As every Cure fan knows, the band’s albums exist somewhere on a sliding scale between two extremes. At one end lurk the albums on which Robert Smith gives free rein to his natural facility for pop songwriting: The Head on the Door, Wish, the oft-reviled Wild Mood Swings. At the other are the albums on which one imagines Smith thinks his legacy really rests: pitch-black explorations of existential despair on which songs sprawl lengthily and radio-friendly melodies are in short supply, 1982’s notorious Pornography and 2000’s Bloodflowers among them. In a world where the actual singles chart no longer really matters to a band like the Cure – their period as reliable, if idiosyncratic hitmakers drew to a close in the mid-90s, a change in status that had no effect whatsoever on their capacity to fill stadiums and arenas – their first new single in 16 years suggests their forthcoming album Songs of a Lost World tends towards the second category.
Alone is the best part of seven minutes long, and more than half of that time is consumed by a lengthy instrumental introduction: the first track on the forthcoming album, its structure brings to mind Plainsong, the opener from 1989’s career highpoint Disintegration. There’s something deliberately disjointed about its sound: Simon Gallup’s bass doesn’t drive the song so much as decorate it with distorted retorts; the glacial synth and a very Cure-esque guitar line come and go, and there are moments when the whole enterprise feels on the verge of falling apart. It has a beautiful, rather majestic-sounding chord sequence – even at their bleakest, the Cure were almost never tuneless – but it is funereally paced and somehow sounds even slower still because the rhythm track features no hi-hats, just the pounding of a bass drum and snare and the occasional cathartic cymbal crash. If you’re after a comparison from the Cure’s past for that aspect of its sound, you could do worse than think of the similarly brutal and austere drums that underpin Pornography, most specifically Cold.
