(Credits: Far Out / Sam Rockman)
Sun 19 October 2025 5:00, UK
As much as I love them dearly, The Cure were fully in elder statesmen territory last year.
What’s more, the status suited them. They were universally beloved national treasures whose live shows could still be absolutely slaughter at a moment’s notice. Need proof? Look at their rapturously received headline slots at Glastonbury and Reading Festivals, along with a few of the biggest headline dates they’d ever played at Hyde Park in 2018.
As much as Robert Smith kept stringing us fans along with promises of a new album, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who really needed one.
After all, the band’s last album of new material came in 2008 with the thoroughly decent, far from life-changing 4:13 Dream. No one really needed to hear any new material when generations of new bands were still coming up worshipping The Cure. Then, their first album of new material in 16 years, Songs of a Lost World was announced. Fair enough, we all thought. It was about time Bob’s talk of a new album actually paid off and if we got a tour out of it, high fives all around. Then, the weirdest thing happened.
Songs of a Lost World absolutely fucking ripped. It was their best album since Disintegration, one of the best they’d ever done and it wasn’t even close. With one album, The Cure had effortlessly proved they still had it and the first signs that the band were well and truly back came from the album’s first single ‘Alone’. A prime slice of dreamy, classic Cure-esque psyche-pop that took a full three and a half minutes before Robert Smith’s plaintive vocals came in, singing “This is the end of every song that we sing.”
What inspired the first single from The Cure in 16 years?
In amongst how spectacular the album was, it was also pretty apparent that Songs of a Lost World was a desperately sad album. Yes, even by the standards set by The Cure. That’s how you know things have not exactly been rosy at Chez Smith. The record was mainly inspired by the loss of Smith’s brother, and the album’s lush, gothic sound has very little to do with their back catalogue of pop hits like ‘The Lovecats’ and ‘In Between Days’.
‘Alone’ is a perfect example of this. The song had a very specific inspiration, one that came neither from any other band or a specific song, but rather a poem. Ernest Christopher Dowson published the collection of poems Decorations: In Verse and Prose in 1899, the last collection of his work published before his untimely death in 1900. Many of his turns of phrases, like “gone with the wind” and “days of wine and roses” have passed into popular culture but ‘Alone’ comes from a more specific source, his poem ‘Dregs’.
Both pieces of art share a similar sense of desolation, with the opening line of ‘Alone’ being a paraphrase of the closing line of ‘Dregs’. In a press release for the record, Smith said, “As soon as we finished recording, I remembered the poem ‘Dregs’… and that was the moment when I knew the song – and the album – were real.”
A sign, if one was needed, that you never truly know what is going to inspire your next move. What’s more, if you keep your mind open, then you also never truly know just how far that next move can take you.
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