The Cure’s Long-Awaited New Single “Alone” Is a Celestial Lament

The Cure have finally returned home – that is, to our speakers, with new music. The legendary art-rockers are back in stunning form with a majestically moody ode to emptiness entitled “Alone”. This “broken-voiced lament to call us home” is destined to become another timeless tune in the expansive Cure canon. “Alone” is the lead single from the much-delayed, much-anticipated, now-imminent album Songs of a Lost World and the beloved band’s first studio release in over a decade and a half. 

“Alone” is a slyly subversive slice of anti-pop, served as a single yet sprawling out into a cosmically melancholic seven minutes. The darkly swaying, extended instrumental intro allows it to unfurl languidly and elegantly before frontman Robert Smith’s pristinely plaintive vocals appear. “Alone” ain’t no fizzy-catchy pop tune. Chiming guitar intertwines with mournful, ethereal synths, stately drums, and distorted bass, leading fluidly into Smith’s signature warped warble – a boyish yet otherworldly howl – offering us a chilling serenade as he laments loss and the tragic truth that all things must end: “It all stops / We were sure that we would never change.”

The plodding pace and use of space on “Alone” recall much earlier Cure songs like “Seventeen Seconds” and “Faith”, while the all-enveloping feeling is reminiscent of cuts on Disintegration and Bloodflowers. Somehow, the track is raw and visceral yet infused with celestial gravity. This is what the Cure do best: conjuring unfathomably deep moods. “Alone’s” gloomily grandiose atmosphere overwhelms even as subtle background details such as keyboardist Roger O’Donnell’s piano plinkings and guitar maestro’s Reeves Gabrels’ muted “seagull” sounds add a nuanced levity to the crushing proceedings. 

“Alone” is not technically a brand-new Cure song, nor have the Cure been truly absent for 16 years. There have been festivals and tours – most recently, a triumphant world tour in 2022-2023, during which “Alone” and other songs from the forthcoming album were premiered. Indeed, the songs have been gestating for years, but the studio versions have been delayed in proverbial Cure fashion. Robert Smith is a notorious perfectionist and notoriously mercurial. He’s also been declaring an end to the band since almost the beginning, way back in the late 1970s. 

Existential themes thread through many Cure songs – most obviously in their darker moments, of which there are many, but even in their more mainstream pop songs, such as “In Between Days” and “Just Like Heaven”. However, as Smith has noted in interviews in the last few years, he didn’t fathom genuine sorrow until the death of his parents and brother, and “Alone” is perhaps one of the most devastating songs in the entire Cure catalogue, evoking an agonizing sense of loss that can deeply resonate with many listeners. While the songs on the Cure’s darkest work, Pornography, may capture a youthful torment, “Alone” is the sound of that same anguish, wholly matured. 

The song’s dense textures revel in the inescapable experience of our collective transience as we slide into sleep “to dream a boy and girl who dream the world is nothing but a dream” in glorious Edgar Allan Poe-echoes. “Where did it go?” Robert wails as a lush storm of music swirls around him. Resigned despair is palpable in his voice, but a peculiar kind of catharsis is nigh: “Here’s to love, all the love, falling out of our lives.” Emptiness has never sounded so fully realized.