The Cure share epic and emotional single ‘Alone’ and announce long-awaited new album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’

nme.com:

The Cure have shared their epic and emotional new single ‘Alone’, as well as confirming the release of their long-awaited new album ‘Songs Of A Lost World’.The post-punk legends have been teasing the follow-up to 2008’s ‘4:13 Dream‘ for some weeks now, starting by changing their online presence before sending fans postcards alluding to the album title and release date, putting up a poster at the Crawley pub where they played their first gig, beaming projections in cities around the world, and launching a secret website and WhatsApp channel that would later give fans a short taster of ‘Alone‘.Now the song, one of the many new tracks previewed on the band’s 90-date, 33-country ‘Shows Of A Lost World’ tour, has been released.With frontman Robert Smith having previously told NME that their first album in 16 years would be “merciless” and would “express the darker side of what I’ve experienced over the last few years” – drawing more on the sounds of classic album ‘Pornography’ as “it hasn’t got any of those songs that lighten the mood at all” due to having lost his mother, father and brother in recent years, the track is a sprawling indie-noir moodpiece that sees the frontman sing of feeling “cold and afraid“, adding: “The ghosts of all that we’ve been, wwe toast with bitter dregs to our emptiness”.Clocking in at nearly seven minutes long, ‘Alone’ breathes with a long sigh of the band’s ghostly textures before Smith begins to sing at around the halfway mark with the line they’ve long been teasing: “This is the end of every song that we sing“.

Gliding on the band’s more cinematic and expansive side rather than their knack for a radio-ready pop smash, ‘Alone’ makes for a powerful return, and one of The Cure’s most devastating.