Pitchfork

After numerous vague allusions, breakup-music archetypes The Cure have finally made details of their summer festival tour official. Stage-spanning compatriots of Robert Smith and his band include the kindred spirits of Interpol, the groove-infused but nevertheless Curarian stylings of d-punk fatcats The Rapture, and the post-rock paragons that are Mogwai. Entitled Curiosa, the festival will also play host to a second stage, inhabited by a rotating cast of bands such as Cursive, Muse, Thursday, Head Automatica, The Cooper Temple Clause, and Auf Der Maur. Venues have not yet been declared for the currently available dates, and both the lineup and the tour itinerary are subject to additions, but the current chronology of Curiosa 2004 looks a little something like this:

07-24 West Palm Beach, FL
07-25 Tampa, FL
07-28 Nashville, TN
07-29 Atlanta, GA
07-31 New York, NY
08-01 Camden, NJ
08-03 Cincinnati, OH
08-04 Cleveland, OH
08-07 Boston, MA
08-11 Detroit, MI
08-12 Chicago, IL
08-14 Dallas, TX
08-15 Houston, TX
08-17 Denver, CO
08-18 Salt Lake City, UT
08-27 Los Angeles, CA

As previously reported, The Cure's 13th full-length recording, produced by Ross Robinson, will be eponymous in a late-career fashion much akin to Sugar Ray, and is set for release on June 22nd, on Robinson's I Am Recordings label. Furthermore, Rhino Records is poised to release a series of reissues-- Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography-- on August 17th. The band has a handful of solo dates remaining prior to the Curiosa festival:

05-22 Washington, DC - RFK Stadium
06-26 Hamburg, Germany - Hurricane Festival
06-27 Stuttgart, Germany - Southside Festival
07-09 Manchester, England - Move Festival
07-10 Naas, Ireland - Oxegen Festival

Meanwhile, Interpol are supposedly entrenched in a studio with Peter Katis, working on their second full-length release. Mogwai have implied forthcoming American dates inbetween Curiosa performances, and The Rapture are probably passed out in a ditch somewhere. Music!