In amidst the billowing synthesisers and windswept guitars, here’s a couple of lines where Robert Smith in “Alone” – The Cure’s first new single for 16 years – sings about “a boy and girl / who dream the world is nothing / but a dream”. In some respects, it’s not too much of a stretch to see The Cure as Robert Smith’s own dream world – a self-sufficient fiefdom which operates on his own terms, largely without external influence. Musically, The Cure always been skilled at conjuring up their own hermetically-sealed musical environments, but this is also a band who have existed for almost a third of their lifetime purely as a live entity, away from the endless album > tour > album > tour routines familiar to most bands, admirably pursuing their own agenda, however mysterious that might sometimes appear.
Take, for example, new music, which Smith has been teasing sporadically since 2014, when he announced 4:14 Scream – the follow-up to the band’s 2008 album, 4:13 Dream. Since then, they played two new songs “It Can Never Be The Same” and “Step Into The Light” at the Smith-curated Meltdown festival in 2019. All that shifted slightly in 2022, when Smith finally revealed the title of a new Cure album – Songs Of The Lost World – while six new songs appeared in the band’s setlists during their 2023/24 world tour.
“Alone” arrives – at last! – after a teaser campaign running for these last few weeks, including a new website for the album and a snippet of the track. For those who have waited 16 years for this, “Alone” is reassuringly The Cure. The closest reference point is the stately “Plainsong”, the opening track from their 1989 masterpiece Disintegration, which was similarly borne along on widescreen synth washes and found Smith wide-eyed in the face of apocalyptic drama. Here, “the fire burned out to ash and the stars / grown dim with tears” recalls “the fire is almost cold / And there’s nothing left to burn” from Bloodflowers’ “39”, but while that track seemed more about Smith’s own anxieties that his creative wellspring was running dry as he neared 40, “Alone” has a much grander sweep: “This is the end of every song we sing,” no less.
As the opening track for Songs Of The Lost World, it finds Smith setting out his stall for the rest of the album. Windwept, asking questions, fearing the worst, this is very much Robert Smith and The Cure we can welcome back.
Songs Of A Lost World is released on November 1 by Fiction/Polydor on 1LP, 2LP, marble vinyl, cassette, CD, deluxe CD/Blu-ray with Atmos mix. Pre-order here.
