The Cure – Alone
Making their very first Jukebox appearance…
[Video]
[7.00]
Ian Mathers: I wasn’t exactly waiting for new material from the Cure, but I still find myself feeling very sickos.jpg about the three-and-a-half minute instrumental slowcore intro here. Smith sings exactly like he always has, thank fuck, sounding wracked with anguish over the inexorable, weighty trudge of the song. The funniest possible thing would be for some snippet of this to just blow up on TikTok.
[7]
TA Inskeep: Finally, new Cure music that sounds like classic Cure. That long intro, the extended keyboard chords, those guitar textures, and Robert Smith sounding despondent: yes please! As a Cure fan going back close to 40 years, “Alone” is everything I hoped for from their first new music in 16.
[9]
Alfred Soto: The synths coast alongside the guitars like fighter jets leading a passenger jet to a runway, while the drums pound their irregular patterns. The slow opening crawl — how Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me of them. “This is the end of every song we’ll sing,” Robert Smith lies. Not so long as he can thatch his hair, apply moist lipstick, keep his global audience, and keep writing and singing songs this confidently.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: I like the depressive realism here: the long awaited musical comeback as an occasion for apocalyptic dread rather than celebration. “We’re older, we’re frailer, we missed the boat, we’ll never be able to match your favorite album from 1987 because we lack the nervous, buzzing urgency that glued us to our audience at a time when rock music was still the lingua franca of youth; please buy our merch.” Bracingly honest! But it’s one thing to assign conceptual purpose to a three-minute opener of dense ambient murk, and another to make the listener intuitively feel that purpose, in between wondering why the snare is so dang loud.
[5]
Jel Bugle: I saw that lots of people were excited for the return of the Cure, like Gandalf swooping in at Helm’s Deep. I contemplated muting the word “Cure” just so I wouldn’t say anything mean about them, and I could keep my pals. I guess it has an epic feel, and I’m sure all the Cure fans will love it — you’ve got to give the people what they want, after all. If, like me, you quite like “Friday I’m In Love” and that’s as far as you go with the Cure, then you are not gonna go crazy for this one. Sounds like a deep cut of an obscure album that is 3% of Cure fans’ favourite.
[3]
Nortey Dowuona: I’ve probably walked past a person who’s died every day I’ve lived in Brooklyn. Sometimes, I looked them in the eyes and scurried away, trying not to think of my own oncoming demise and soothing my wounded heart with the lie that there was nothing I could have done. But there often is something — sometimes just staying and talking them through it can be enough. In the end, each of us is alone, waiting for our life to ebb out of us. Those are the lucky ones. There aren’t even a lot of lyrics in this song, Robert Smith’s voice cries out in pain and despair as per usual and fades. But for the first three minutes, the band coalesces, the two chords constantly playing then resolving with riffing atop the mix, the snare cracking loudly in the corner, the piano tiptoeing towards the top then receding, but still, no voice. By the time Smith’s voice appears, you have seen through the mind’s manipulative trick and wail, gnash your teeth, howl, but your body won’t fight anymore. As you finally accept your fate, the fluorescent lights start shutting down, the tables collapse. your heart slows, your lungs go flat, your mind shuts down. In the empty void, you finally stop being you. you finally stop being.
[9]
Mark Sinker: Nearly 50 years since I first heard Bob sing: late night, I’m guessing, on the John Peel show, snuggled up under my bedclothes with my little handheld radio (a cartoon cliché that is also actually true). The Cure were disdained by the music press at the time so I wanted not really to like them — I was a very suggestible teenager this way — except secretly I did like them. What did I like most? The keening flat gloom in Bob’s voice — which for some reason I’ve never really identified brought me great joy. The group is very funny. Do they mean to be? Does this matter? The joy may be extremely goofy but it’s also extremely reliable: live versions of “A Forest” for hour on hour on hour, stretching out over days, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year (to where the goth dreams are). “Alone” is only six minutes long, but the three minutes Bob takes to start is an endearing nod to those long-ago live versions (and how we tested him about them). And it’s soooooo slooooow, and that’s pretty funny too. This is just Cure stuff: sometimes they are the Platonic form of themselves. I look into my heart and I find that one-note ridiculous as they’ve always been, I really do love them, after all. Here at the end of all things, as they say.
[6]
Katherine St. Asaph: I will never stop loving songs so unabashedly sweeping, so full of sea-tossed dramatics, that they make a several-minutes-long, only subtly changing instrumental loop — see also Stina Nordenstam’s “CQD” — sound like the heavily truncated edit of a song large enough to span the entire world.
[9]
Aaron Bergstrom: I’ve never really gotten into weighted blankets, but for the people who love them, this is how I imagine it must feel. Whether it’s the weight of the drums or the weight of mortality, we’re all here because we want to get crushed by something.
[8]
My appreciation for the Cure is likely pretty surface-level, mostly the hits and all that, though I’ll always come back to their contribution to the X-Files Movie’s soundtrack. So a 7-minute slowfest isn’t quite what I’m looking for, really. Admittedly, all I can think is, “My god, his voice hasn’t changed in the slightest!”
Is this the best song they’ve ever done? No. Is it really that far out of step with the post-Disintegration material that many disdain as unworthy shadows of their peak 80s material? Also no. Is it a logical progression of the music they’ve put out a decade-plus prior and does it go as hard as they’ve been going all along? Absolutely yes.
It’s not a return to form; they’ve always been this good.