The Cure fans have been waiting for new songs from the band for 16 years, but, in all honesty, the spectacular collection of over 40 years on the road gives Robert Smith and company a comfortable base where those who love their music have enough to keep them firm while waiting for him to open the safe.

Robert Smith is a perfectionist. That’s why knowing that finally, as he sang in Maybe Someday, the day has come, we know that Songs Of A Lost World will be incredible. The single, Alone, has been the opening of their shows (including the one they did in Brazil in December 2023), a song that demonstrates the intact talent and quality of one of the most iconic bands of the last four decades.

As melancholic as we like it, with a long introduction that is The Cure‘s signature, Alone explores themes familiar to the group: the anguish of the passing of time, isolation, and disillusionment. Taciturn is at its peak, grandiose and moving, it is moving in the right tone.

When Robert Smith warns that This is the end of every song that we sing, he is quoting Ernest Dowson‘s poem Dregs, which explores melancholy and disenchantment with life and love. Through vivid imagery and metaphors, Dowson expresses the pain of lost love and the feeling that what remains are only the bitter sediments of past experiences. He died tragically at just 32 years old, in 1900, as a result of tuberculosis.

Smith loves to quote angsty authors, from Albert Camus to Ernest Dowson, who, although from different eras and literary contexts, share some themes and characteristics in their works that make them comparable, such as Love and Disillusionment; Death and Mortality, and the Exploration of Pessimism and the Absurd, making their works rich in themes that resonate with the human condition. And set to music by the sensitive The Cure.

In the particular case of Dowson, who was an English poet, novelist, and short story writer associated with the decadent movement, he became known for running on themes of unrequited love, melancholy, and the fleeting nature of life. As in Dregs, which translates as “Residues”.

Therefore, with the opening line of Alone being This is the end of every song that we sing, Robert Smith is responding to Dowson who wrote This is the end of every song man sings! referring to the fact that all good and beautiful things, like songs, eventually come to an end. The composer has been dealing with the issue of stopping for a while now. We practically have a playlist where he sings that it’s the end, that he won’t come back, that the pleasure has passed. Maybe Someday, from the 2000 album Blooflowers, had already been a “farewell” and 4:13 Dream, from 2008, closed with the song It’s Over.

Perhaps we are demanding too much from our idols by expecting new songs every few years. Over these 16 years without releasing anything new, the band has done spectacular tours and never disappointed its fans. Releasing a full album of new songs is driving us crazy. Two of them, Alone and I Can Never Say Goodbye, which he wrote and dedicated to his recently deceased brother.

For an artist fixated on mortality, the pandemic and isolation were essential in inspiring him to finish the songs he didn’t consider “finished”. I was at their show (OF COURSE!) in 2023, and both new releases signal that we’ll love Songs Of A Lost World.

About Alone? It’s nostalgia in its veins. It sings about unfulfilled dreams, the bittersweet feeling of aging and isolation, something so recent and already sublimated in our hasty selective memory. It’s beautiful, it’s moving and extremely welcome. Robert Smith may feel lonely, but his fans will never leave him alone.

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