Around the release of 1989’s grand existential crisis Disintegration, Robert Smith discussed how the “need” to make another album had to “outweigh the distress” the process caused. It's been sixteen years since The Cure’s last record, 4:13 Dream (closing track: It’s Over), a stretch of time long enough to suggest that new music was no longer on the cards. Smith has been promising at least one - maybe two - new Cure albums, on a semi-regular, semi-comical basis since about 2019, yet as the years passed, it seemed sensible to prepare for The Cure’s sole future incarnation being that of beloved live band, breaking their own records for ticket sales as they headed towards their fiftieth year.
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As it turns out, though, Smith was speaking the truth. Superb new song Alone is the herald of their fourteenth album, Songs Of A Lost World, finally due for release on November 1 on Fiction/Polydor. The song will not be entirely new to fans – it made its debut at Latvia’s Arena Riga on October 6, 2022 – but it there is still something impressively audacious about returning with a track where the first words Smith utters are “this is the end of every song that we sing.” The Cure are back, it says, but the final curtain is twitching at the side of the stage.
“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 says of the track. “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.”
LISTEN TO ALONE:
Driven on by Jason Cooper’s relentless drums and Simon Gallup’s questing bass, Alone has the same cold tidal pull as Disintegration. The echo of lines from that album’s title track – “we both of us knew how the end always is” - immediately folds Alone into The Cure’s universe. Yet 35 years after Disintegration, their landscape has inexorably shifted, the idea of “the end” shifting in meaning and urgency. Smith has recently spoken about losing his mother, father and brother, and Alone is awash with a sense of grief and loss, delivered as a kind of swaying valedictory salute, an apocalyptic drinking song. “We toast with bitter dregs our emptiness,” sings Smith, listing all the things that fall away with time – words, love, dreams. It’s full of ancient portents – birds falling from the skies, extinguished stars, ash – the stuff of a very personal, yet also universal, extinction event. With its Ozymandias grandeur, it sets up the person – or maybe even a band – as a little empire, a kingdom, one that always crumbles away. “Where did it go? Where did it go?” he asks as the music slowly pitches around him.
Stone free: The artwork for The Cure's 14th studio album, Songs Of A Lost World.
Alone’s power comes from a key Cure paradox, though – the ability to build something transcendent from something profoundly bleak, something distressing, yes - but also necessary. It’s long been an article of faith that their fourth album, 1982’s Pornography, is the darkest record they ever made, a piece of psychically mangled, psychedelically warped post-adolescent nihilism that saw the band deliberately driving themselves headlong towards a musical and spiritual dead end. Yet as their original drummer Lol Tolhurst says, it ends with a faint flicker of hope, Smith singing “I must fight this sickness / find a cure”. There is possibly even less hope here, less chance of solace - just grim inevitability and the final word “alone”. Yet by rendering this harsh truth through such beautiful music, Smith holds a space where everyone’s in it together. You want it darker? There’s still no better place to be than in The Cure’s embrace.
Songs Of A Lost World is out November 1 on Fiction/Polydor.
Photo: Sam Rockman