The long wait is over: The Cure have released their new song in over 16 years and confirmed the release date for their upcoming 14th album.
“Alone” will appear on the upcoming LP Songs From a Lost World, which is set to be released Nov 1, 2024 via Polydor/Fiction. Listen to the track below.
The track appeared as the opening song on the band’s Shows of a Lost World global tour throughout 2022 and 2023. The album has been long in the making, with its original release dates mooted for 2019. The album’s tracklist will be revealed in the coming weeks on the band’s social media channels.
Speaking about the song, frontman Robert Smith said that “Alone” was “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.”
He added: “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. That was the moment when I knew the song – and the album – were real.”
Songs From a Lost World was produced by Smith and Paul Corkett, who co-produced The Cure’s 2000 album Bloodflowers. The album features contributions from Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums), Reeves Gabriel (guitar) and Roger O’Donnell (keyboards). The latter recently announced he’d been diagnosed with rare and “aggressive” blood cancer a year ago, but added that “I’m fine and the prognosis is amazing”.
In recent weeks the band had been teasing the release of Songs From a Lost World to fans via mystery postcards and puzzles. Smith has been revealing details of the LP for many years, and speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2019, he blamed himself for some of the delays. “I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly. At some point, I have to say that’s it. It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” Smith added.
“I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me. 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.”