As every Cure fan knows, the band’s albums exist somewhere on a sliding scale between two extremes. At one end lurk the albums on which Robert Smith gives free rein to his natural facility for pop songwriting: The Head on the Door, Wish, the oft-reviled Wild Mood Swings. At the other are the albums on which one imagines Smith thinks his legacy really rests: pitch-black explorations of existential despair on which songs sprawl lengthily and radio-friendly melodies are in short supply, 1982’s notorious Pornography and 2000’s Bloodflowers among them. In a world where the actual singles chart no longer really matters to a band like the Cure – their period as reliable, if idiosyncratic hitmakers drew to a close in the mid-90s, a change in status that had no effect whatsoever on their capacity to fill stadiums and arenas – their first new single in 16 years suggests their forthcoming album Songs of a Lost World tends towards the second category.
Alone is the best part of seven minutes long, and more than half of that time is consumed by a lengthy instrumental introduction: the first track on the forthcoming album, its structure brings to mind Plainsong, the opener from 1989’s career highpoint Disintegration. There’s something deliberately disjointed about its sound: Simon Gallup’s bass doesn’t drive the song so much as decorate it with distorted retorts; the glacial synth and a very Cure-esque guitar line come and go, and there are moments when the whole enterprise feels on the verge of falling apart. It has a beautiful, rather majestic-sounding chord sequence – even at their bleakest, the Cure were almost never tuneless – but it is funereally paced and somehow sounds even slower still because the rhythm track features no hi-hats, just the pounding of a bass drum and snare and the occasional cathartic cymbal crash. If you’re after a comparison from the Cure’s past for that aspect of its sound, you could do worse than think of the similarly brutal and austere drums that underpin Pornography, most specifically Cold.
When Smith’s voice finally appears, it’s singing lyrics that seem to be based on Dregs, an 1899 work by the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson. Dowson’s poetry has inspired songs before – it was him that came up with the phrase “days of wine and roses” (and, for that matter, “gone with the wind”), and both Cole Porter and Morrissey paraphrased his famous line about being “faithful to you … in my fashion”. But Dregs is something else entirely: written shortly before his death, it is filled with ghosts, hopelessness and morbidity. And so is Alone. In among the images it borrows from Dowson, it throws in some intimations of mortality of Smith’s own devising: birds fall from the sky, broken voices call us home, youthful dreams are dashed against the transience of life. At 65, Smith sounds horrified by the idea of life ending: “Where did it go? Where did it go?” he pleads at one affecting juncture. His voice hasn’t changed much over the years, but the singer of Alone sounds very different indeed from the twentysomething who opened One Hundred Years with a nihilistic shrug of “it doesn’t matter if we all die”.
Smith clearly has personal reasons for fixating on mortality – he’s talked about how losing both his parents and his older brother during the lengthy process of making Songs for a Lost World shaped the material, and we’ll clearly find out just how much in the fullness of time. But as an opening salvo, a teaser for what’s to come, the overall message of Alone to his audience seems to be: abandon hope all ye who think the Cure’s best song is The Lovecats or Friday I’m in Love. But for those who ultimately prefer the Cure when they’re wreathed in misery and despair – as you suspect Smith does – Alone is quite the appetiser.
