They did it! After years of rumors and innuendo, the Cure are back with new music! And more importantly, it sounds like the Cure! The legendary band has been plenty active as a touring act over the past decade and a half, and they’ve been debuting new songs live. Next week, they’ll release a couple of those new live tracks on vinyl. They’ve also been using postcards and billboards to announce their new album Songs Of A Lost World, and they’ve also teased the new track “Alone,” the song they played to open every show of the 2022-2023 Shows Of A Lost World Tour. Today, the album announcement is official, and the new song is out in the world. It’s awesome.

The Cure’s new song “Alone” really and truly is a Cure song. It’s an elegant, luxurious seven-minute grief-wallow with drums that hit like velvet sledgehammers and keyboards that sigh like they’re looking at old videos of dead family members. Robert Smith, the only person on earth who convincingly sounds like Robert Smith, sings about the world ending and turning out to be nothing but a dream. It’s just a beautiful song. Here’s what Smith says about it:

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. 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… as soon as we finished recording I remembered the poem “Dregs” by the English poet Ernest Dowson… and that was the moment when I knew the song — and the album — were real.

Along with Smith, who wrote and arranged the album and produced and mixed it with Paul Corkett, the Cure features Simon Gallup, Jason Cooper, Roger O’Donnell, and Reeves Gabrels. They recorded Songs Of A Lost World at Wales’ Rockfield Studios and Andy Vella did the artwork, which features Janez Pirnat’s 1975 sculpture Bagatelle.

Song Of A Lost World, the first new Cure album since 2008, will arrive in just over a month. The band isn’t ready to reveal anything else about the record yet — the tracklist will be unveiled “over the coming weeks” — but you can hear “Alone” below.

Songs Of A Lost World is out 11/1.