How The Cure’s New Single “Alone” Inspired Their Latest Album

The Cure’s new single “Alone” is the band’s first since 2008. It preceded their latest album Songs of a Lost World, which arrived on November 1.

Frontman Robert Smith said in a statement, “It’s the track that unlocked the record.” He added, “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.”

“Dregs”

Smith said he’d struggled to write the song’s opening line. The idea of “being alone” was simple enough, then he recalled the Ernest Dowson poem “Dregs.”

Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropped curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

The Cure’s bittersweet opening verse borrows heavily from Dowson’s poem. It’s the pain of loss, sorrow, finality.

This is the end of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash, and the stars grown dim with tears
Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness.

Nothing more alone than emptiness. Smith sings about vanishing hopes and dreams. But what if life just feels like some kind of dream? Something fleeting and seemingly real only for as long as it lasts. “Alone” sits in the same hazy ambiance as The Cure’s 1989 masterpiece Disintegration. (Cue “Plainsong.”)

To All the Love

The track’s brooding three-and-a-half-minute intro lulls you into a hallucination. When Smith begins singing, it sounds like he’s awakened to tell you what he’s just dreamed.

But it’s not all dark. He layers his voice in multitudes of overdubs and blurred reverb. The following verse sounds more like a transmission from another dimension. Though he’s taking stock, acknowledging the joy of love, he ultimately laments how easily it all went away.

And the birds falling out of our skies
And the words falling out of our minds
And here is to love, to all the love.

The Cure recorded Songs of a Lost World at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Working with Paul Corkett, Smith wrote and produced the band’s 14th studio album, which features a 1975 Janez Pirnat sculpture called “Bagatelle” on the cover.

The sculpture also appears in the black-and-white lyric video for “Alone.” The Slovenian artist lived his final years on Brač, an island in Croatia. According to The Slovenia Times, following Pirnat’s death in 2021, Smith sponsored a tribute on the island called Days of Janez Pirnat Nejašmić.

Then, he worked with designer Andy Vella to create the artwork for the album. Pirnat, who took his wife’s surname after marrying her, described himself as “a Stone Age man, a stonemason, in love with everything old, as old as possible.” The spinning sculpture in the grainy video gives motion to a static piece. Pirnat fell in love with old things, connecting to a history of something or someone—connections, stories, ghosts inside the material.

Ghosts

Maybe they are the same ghosts Smith mentions in his song. It’s a soundtrack to one’s life flickering past in still frames and unreliable memories. Unreliable because the farther we are from the event, the fuzzier the details. Where did it go? Smith sings as he hurls toward an ending—the ending.

The band repeats its musical phrase, leading the singer to a final abyss before he comes upon his arrival: This is the end of every song we sing, alone.

When forming the album, Smith obsessively rewrote the songs. He told Rolling Stone he tried to grasp nostalgia for “a world that never happened.” The rest of the album followed from “Alone.” Like he’d created a world he couldn’t contain within only one song.

As Smith struggled with how to open the first verse, maybe all he had to do was remember his dream. It nagged at him like it was moving to fall from his mind—to paraphrase his lyric. The glacial track is nearly seven minutes long. It’s propelled by watery synths and a slightly distorted bass. The skittering drumbeat and tom fills would do well as the soundtrack to giant crashing rocks in the cosmos. The unconscious beauty of a signal.  

The Cure writes sad songs better than any band. “Alone” is sad, like the other side of joy. Kind of like when something comes to an end.

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Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns