The Cure’s first music in 16 years is the gloomiest song you’ll ever hear – and it’s a hit

Robert Smith of The Cure
Robert Smith of The Cure - John Stoddart/Popperfoto via Getty Images

The Cure have returned with what might be the most monumentally gloomy song ever conceived, a six-minute sludge of icily frozen depression that sounds like Berlin-era Bowie being waterboarded with buckets of oil. And I do mean that as a compliment.

Alone is the first new music from Robert Smith’s epic ensemble in 16 years, presaging a forthcoming new album Songs Of A Lost World, out on November 1. And it is perversely compelling, a quite magnificent riposte to the modern pop environment of TikTok and Spotify streaming playlists, a comeback single that transgresses all the supposed rules of today’s two minute wonders. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus” may be the rallying cry of the contemporary hit parade, but Smith and his doom laden ensemble spend three and a half minutes churning around a deeply melancholy chord progression at a stately mid-tempo pace before the frontman even opens his mouth to emit his first strangulated lyric: “This is the end of every song that we sing / The fire burned out to ash / And the stars grown dim with tears …”

Smith has often rejected the notion that the Cure are the Kings of Goth, but Alone might qualify as the most Goth song ever made. Where modern pop records tend to be clean and bright and full of space, The Cure have conjured a total wall of sound, filling every sonic crevice with tinkling and cascading chimes of distorted guitar and echoing synths. The drums clatter like they have been recorded down the bottom of a well by an old Zombie drum machine running low on battery power. The main keyboards are so thick and sonorously slow moving it sounds like the aural equivalent of mainlining ketamine. The song itself, when it eventually deigns to get started, is an apocalyptic lament to the end of everything. “Cold and afraid / the ghosts of all that we’ve been / we toast with bitter dregs / to our emptiness.”

That’ll cheer them up down in the Bat Cave. Bela Lugosi himself couldn’t have delivered it with any more theatrical despair. Yet the whole effect is deeply gripping, an epic of resigned sadness for the fate of the human race, or perhaps just a particularly apocalyptic invocation of the end of an affair: “We close our eyes to sleep, to dream / A boy and girl who dream the world is nothing but a dream...”

Somehow, it is little surprise to learn that Smith was inspired by an obscure work of despair entitled Dregs by minor Victorian poet, Ernest Dowson, who died tragically young in 1900 at the age of 32 and is now best known for coining the phrase “days of wine and roses.” Dregs contains the line “This is the end of every song man sings” that Smith has taken as his central motif.

It is a weird testament to Smith’s self-conviction that he should step back into the songwriting fray with something so crushingly downbeat. Since the Cure’s debut as a post punk trio with Three Imaginary Boys in 1979, the guitarist and songwriter has followed his own curious path, weaving between epic art rock and jangly indie pop that has inspired intense devotion. The Cure have sold over 30 million albums worldwide, headlined Glastonbury festival four times and were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. But the once prolific Smith has been creatively quiet since thirteenth album, 4:13 Dream, in 2006. He has been speaking about the follow up for years, and occasionally playing new songs live, but admitted in 2019 that it was all “very, very doom and gloom” and he didn’t know quite what to do with it.

Well, it seems that he has worked it out. Smith’s lamentation “This is the end” has the welcome ring of a new beginning for one of pop’s most iconoclastic characters and his quirkily original band.


Alone is available to stream now. Songs Of A Lost World is out November 1