The Cure have announced their first new song in 16 years, entitled Alone, to be released on Thursday. A post on the band’s social media contains a snippet of the song: a symphonic ballad with heavy drums and lurching electric guitar, with frontman Robert Smith singing: “This is the end of every song that we sing / the fire burned out to ash, the stars grow dim with tears.” The song’s premiere will be on Mary Anne Hobbs’s BBC Radio 6 Music show, airing at noon in the UK. It brings to an end one of the longest-awaited returns in rock, one that the Cure have been teasing for a number of years. The band’s most recent new music was 2008’s 4:13 Dream, described by the Guardian at the time as “admirably taut and vibrant, though nothing here scales classic heights”. Smith said a sister record, entitled 4:14 Scream, would be released in 2014 but it was later scrapped. In 2018, he told the Guardian: “I’ve hardly written any words since then. I think there’s only so many times you can sing certain emotions. I have tried to write songs about something other than how I felt but they’re dry, they’re intellectual, and that’s not me.” But in the same interview, partly inspired by the Meltdown festival he curated, he said that the band was committed to going back to the studio. Subsequent sessions in 2019 produced a huge amount of music, according to Smith: “The songs are like 10 minutes, 12 minutes long. We recorded 19 songs,” he told Rolling Stone. “We just played music for three weeks. And it’s great. I know everyone says that. But it really is fucking great. It’s so dark. It’s incredibly intense.” Details went quiet until 2022, when Smith announced the album had an intended title, Songs of a Lost World. The album, probably containing Alone, hasn’t been officially announced, but that title looks to be unchanged. Along with mysterious postcards being sent to a select few, a poster was put up outside a pub in the band’s home town of Crawley with the words Songs of a Lost World and a date of 1 November 2024 in Roman numerals – the presumed release date. With a rich discography spanning nervy guitar pop and neo-gothic grandeur, the Cure have retained a huge following, including young fans. They have more than 17m monthly listens on Spotify, considerably more than most bands from the 1980s. They have continued to tour regularly in the years since 4:13 Dream, playing celebrated sets that often break the three-hour mark. Smith took Ticketmaster to task over the band’s 2023 US tour, saying he was “sickened” by the company’s fees and subsequently secured a partial refund for ticketholders. Earlier this month, keyboardist Roger O’Donnell announced he had been diagnosed with “a very rare and aggressive” form of lymphoma, a blood cancer. “I’m fine and the prognosis is amazing. The mad axe murderer knocked on the door and we didn’t answer,” he said.