The Cure is back with the band’s first song in 16 years, “Alone,” and let me tell you, it’s a good thing I was alone while listening, heh heh. (“Boys Don’t Cry,” apparently, but I definitely do.)
I’ve been a fan of The Cure since I was a kid, piling into the backseat of my dad’s truck with my brothers and singing along to “Friday I’m in Love” after a long week at my Catholic elementary school.
Videos by VICE
Growing up with a father who was a former drummer in a rock band will instill a passion for music in you, and I’ve always gravitated toward gothic rock. Cure fans often get labeled as “lame” or “melodramatic,” titles that I—as a deep-feeling, reflective writer—tend to wear with pride. So “Alone” came at just the right time: a gloomy autumn morning.
After teasing new music on social media for the past few weeks, The Cure announced its upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World, along with its opening track, “Alone.” The LP will be released on November 1. It’s the band’s 14th album, 46 years after they got together. There’s no talk of a tour yet.
“Alone” calls back to the 1989 album Disintegration and the 2000 album Bloodflowers with its captivating chord sequence, slow and gloomy progression, and ruminative lyrics. Robert Smith’s voice hasn’t aged in the slightest as he kicks off the first verse:
This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast, with bitter dregs, to our emptiness
The lyrics pay homage to “Dregs” by Ernest Christopher Dowson, a poem exploring themes like grief, death, and loneliness. You know, the usual.
“It’s the track that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus,” Smith said in a press release.
“I had been struggling to find the right opening line for the right opening song for a while, working with the simple idea of ‘being alone’, always in the back of my mind this nagging feeling that I already knew what the opening line should be… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem ‘Dregs’ by the English poet Ernest Dowson… and that was the moment when I knew the song—and the album—were real.”
The Cure’s last album was 2008’s 4:13 Dream. In 2019, the band revealed that they recorded 19 new tracks, but the planned release of an album around Halloween that year simply never happened.
Fans are prepared for The Cure’s comeback—or their possible self-written eulogy, aka the band’s alleged last album before retirement. I mean, these guys are well into their 60s, but they’re clearly still going strong. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the deal is.
