The waiting is almost over: the Cure have formally announced their first full-length release in 16 years. The gothic rock icons’ long-promised, and much-anticipated Songs of a Lost World is set to be released November 1st via Lost Music Limited / Universal. And to celebrate, the band have unveiled atmospherically heady first single “Alone.”
The album was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, and was produced by Cure leader Robert Smith and Paul Corkett — the latter having previously worked on the Cure’s 2000 album, Bloodflowers. The lineup on the latest sessions was Smith, Simon Gallup (bass), Jason Cooper (drums), Roger O’Donnell (keyboards) and Reeves Gabrels (guitar). Though a tracklisting has yet to be released in full, Songs of a Lost World is set to be an eight-song release.
“Alone,” however, will be the lead-off track. Cure fans will likewise recognize the slow-rolling, romantic, effects-soaked beauty as the concert-opener from the Cure’s tellingly-titled “Shows of a Lost World” tour in 2023. You can now hear the studio version via the lyric video up above.
“It’s the track that unlocked the record,” Robert Smith said in a statement. “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. 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 cover art, meanwhile, was done by Andy Vella based on a concept by Robert Smith, and it features ‘Bagatelle’, a 1975 sculpture by Janez Pirnat. The stony piece was teased recently on the Cure’s cryptic Songs of a Lost World website, which you could only unlock after dialing in the album’s release date in roman numerals. Once opened, you see the sculpture and hear a snippet of “Alone.”
Songs of a Lost World is the follow-up to 2008’s 4:13 Dream.
