The Cure have shared new song “Alone,” and with it, confirmation that their first album in 16 years, Songs of a Lost World, will arrive on November 1. Robert Smith produced the long-teased album with Paul Corkett at Rockfield Studios in Wales. The band will reveal the tracklist on their new website and their social channels in the coming weeks. Listen to “Alone” below, and scroll down to see the album artwork.
“Alone,” says Robert Smith in a press release, is “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. 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.”
On the path to becoming “real,” the follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream has been through a cycle of ifs and maybes, starting in 2019, when Smith said the Cure had been into the studio and recorded 19 epic songs that would fill a pair of albums. “We’ll finish [an album] before we start [touring] in the summer, and it’ll be mixed through the summer,” he told Rolling Stone that March. He soon confessed to being a little off schedule but insisted he would be “extremely bitter” if the 2019 release date fell through.
In early 2020, he refused to repeat the mistake, letting the album live in purgatory until 2022, when the band teased the Songs of a Lost World title and introduced some new songs to setlists. Two of them, “And Nothing Is Forever” and “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” are set for a live single this November.
Read Sam Sodomsky’s Sunday Review of the Cure’s Wish.