“Alone,” the newly released song by The Cure, has been either the opening song or second song of their live shows since the Fall of ‘22. They opened with it when I saw their show at the Wells Fargo Center here in Philly in June ‘23, and it set the tone for epic 30 song show that followed.
After talking about a “new” album for a few years now, Robert Smith and The Cure have returned, with an instant classic - Disintegration era, slow-burning, dirgy, dark, aching, and beautifully emotional. The build is magical, unfolding with stately brilliance.
“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 says in a press release about the song, from their forthcoming album, Songs Of A Lost World.
“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.”1
Don’t call it a comeback they’ve been here for years.
Dregs - Ernest Dowson
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
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.