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Goths, rejoice: At long last, The Cure have released new music.
“Alone”, their first new song in 16 years, premiered on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC 6 Music radio show Thursday morning (26 September.
The English rock band also announced a new album, titled Songs of A Lost World, to be released on 1 November.
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 jumps in with the line: “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.”
The Cure have toured in the years following the release of their last album, 2008’s 4:13 Dream, but had not released any new material since.
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. However, the album never materialised.
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.
Initially formed in 1978, The Cure have sold over 30 million albums worldwide, headlined Glastonbury festival four times and been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
