The Cure
Alone
★★★★☆
The Cure’s reputation as spiky-haired misanthropes took a turn into left field last year when Robert Smith, the band’s singer, went where other artists feared to venture by confronting the Great Satan that is Ticketmaster and the “unduly high fees” it was charging for the band’s US tour.
Call it Oasis in reverse – or the rare sighting of a moral compass in a business where a sense of right and wrong is too often absent. That was a surprise from an artist who has rarely been so outspoken (unless it regards his bete noire, Morrissey). But with Alone, their first single in 16 years, Smith and his band are back in more familiar territory. The track, which comes in advance of the November 1st release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, is refreshingly, gloomily Cureish.
It starts – and then goes on for some time – with a cacophony of woozy, melodramatic guitars. This is The Cure of their classic doomfests Disintegration and Pornography – an altogether different proposition from the zany indie-disco gadabouts of The Lovecats and Close to Me.
Considering the decade-and-a-half silence since their last record, it is clear that Smith likes to take his time – and so does Alone, which passes three minutes before Smith’s voice, still fragile and melancholic, comes swooping in. He arrives with lyrics as stereotypically Cure as black eyeliner and running mascara. “This is the end of every song we sing,” Smith croons. “The fire burned out to ash, the stars grown dim with tears.”
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On and on it goes, locked in the same stately, funereal pace – less a rollicking return than a calm reset from a band that have spent their entire history orbiting themes of wistfulness and ennui and that, this far in, see no need to rip up the script.
Smith is 65 now, and, as with anyone who has reached that age, he’s been through a few things. He has lost his brother and his parents in a relatively short time span and has said that Songs of a Lost World is shaped by those experiences.
“It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” he explained in 2019, towards the end of the recording sessions. “It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom. It has soundscapes on it, like Disintegration, I suppose. I was trying to create a big palette, a big wash of sound.”
A “big wash of sound” is the perfect description of Alone, a huge aching sigh of a song that, in its darkness, brings great comfort. The world has changed, and people have died or moved on – but The Cure endure, and how joyful it is to hear them sounding as thoughtfully miserable as ever.
[ The Cure’s Robert Smith: ‘I survived. A lot of people in London didn’t’Opens in new window ]
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