The Cure has been found again.
Robert Smith and his band of not-so-merry men are back in their inimitable mope mode with “Alone,” their first new song in 16 years, which was released on Thursday.
And even after such a long wait, the single takes its sweet — or make that, sullen — time to unfold over nearly seven minutes.
In fact, as the group’s absorbing atmospherics — shades of their 1989 classic LP “Disintegration” — set the melancholy mood, it takes three minutes and 22 seconds before Smith even sings a single word.
But finally, he comes in with his tortured croon: “This is the end of every song that we sing/
The fire burned out to ash and the stars grown dim with tears/Cold and afraid, the ghosts of all that we’ve been/We toast with bitter dregs, to our emptiness.”
Inspired by Ernest Dowson’s poem “Dregs,” “Alone” is an ode “to all the love falling out of our lives,” tailor-made for your doldrums after your next breakup.
I mean, did you think that Smith — even though he’s been married to the same woman, Mary Poole, since 1988 — would all of a sudden get happy at 65?
It’s comforting to know that some things — and some alt-rock icons — don’t change.
Accurately described in the song as a “broken-voiced lament,” “Alone” is the first single and opening track of “Songs of a Lost World” — the Cure’s first studio album since 2008’s “4:13 Dream” — which will be released on Nov. 1.
The LP was also the name of the band’s 2022-2023 tour that served as a sort of victory lap after they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. The Cure performed “Alone” during the tour before releasing the song that would, at long last, set off their upcoming album.
“It’s the track that unlocked the record; 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,” Smith said in a press release announcing the new single.
“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.”
“Alone” comes after Cure keyboardist Roger O’Donnell revealed earlier this month that he was diagnosed with “a very rare and aggressive form of lymphoma” last year. But in his Instagram post, he wrote that “I’m fine and the prognosis is amazing.”
In recent weeks, the Cure had been teasing the release of “Songs of a Lost World” with postcards and puzzles before announcing the LP’s release date.
In 2019, Smith told the Los Angeles Times that he blamed himself for the album’s long gestation.
“I keep going back over and redoing them, which is silly,” he said of the new tracks. “At some point, I have to say that’s it.
“It’s very much on the darker side of the spectrum,” he continued. “I lost my mother and my father and my brother recently, and obviously it had an effect on me.”
But, Smith added, “It’s not relentlessly doom and gloom.”