The Cure performs at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans on Wednesday, May 10, 2023. (AP/Brett Duke/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate)
- The Cure's new song "Alone" premiered on BBC 6 Music, marking their first release in 16 years.
- Robert Smith reveals the song's inspiration came from Ernest Dowson's poem "Dregs," unlocking the album's direction.
- The band joins a wave of 2024 reunions, including Oasis and Linkin Park with a new lead singer.
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NEW YORK — Goths, rejoice: At long last, The Cure has released new music.
“Alone,” their first new song in 16 years, premiered on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC 6 Music radio show Thursday morning.
The English band also announced a new album, “Songs of A Lost World,” to be released on Nov. 1.
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Teasing New Music on Social Media
The Cure teased new music on social media leading up to its release, sharing a snippet of the song that featured their trademark layered guitars, metallic percussion and sparkling synths. Near the end, singer Robert Smith jumped in with the gloomy lyrics, “This is the end of every song that we sing.”
“It’s 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,” Smith said in a press release. “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.”
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Long-Awaited Return to the Studio
The Cure has toured in the years since their last album, 2008’s “4:13 Dream,” but has yet to release a new album. In 2019, Smith told Rolling Stone the band had recorded 19 tracks, ranging from 10-12 minutes long, and wanted to release a new album in Halloween of that year. It did not happen.
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Joining the Wave of Band Reunions
But now, The Cure joins a long list of 2024 band reunions, which so far includes everyone from Britpop icons Oasis, who ended a 15-year hiatus and, presumably, the long-held feud between brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, to Linkin Park — now with a new singer, Dead Sara’s Emily Armstrong — their first performances since the 2017 death of lead singer Chester Bennington.
