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The Cure: Alone review – majestically wreathed in misery and despair

Birds fall from the sky, broken voices call us home and youthful dreams are dashed against the transience of life in the band’s first new song in 16 years

Artwork for AloneAlone 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.

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