Hey, buddy, did you hear the news? It's track reviews.

Hey, hi, and hello, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, Internet's busiest music nerd.

Momentous occasion alert. Big track review alert. I don't know if there's much preamble needed for this video. We have the first new song from The Cure. Legendary rock, pop rock, goth rock band. One of the most influential groups out there. One of the best to do it. New album on the way. This is our first taste of it.

It is titled "Alone". It is almost seven minutes in length. Robert has been teasing toward the release of a new Cure album for a while now. That moment is finally coming. So without any further ado, let's try the track and see what it's got.

I wish that was good. Yeah, I wish that had been good and enjoyable to listen to because now I have to talk about why it's not.

Okay, first thing I will say off the bat is I am personally not familiar with any of the technicals on the master or the decibels of this recording or various parts of it. But this track makes me feel like we truly have lost the loudness war. The loudness war, unfortunately, claims another victim on this track, The Cure.

There is no room to breathe in this mix at all, and not even in an interesting, psychedelic, shoegaze-y way. No, just every single element of it, even the parts of the track that sound like they're supposed to come across a softer in a way that's a bit spacier. Even those parts feel loud as fuck.

On top of that, it mostly just feels like the band is trying to execute an older sound, which inherently is not a bad thing. They wouldn't be the first band to mount a comeback and do the same. But the issue is that it's not playing very well. It's not sounding good through the modern production tools and techniques they're employing here.

Because with this very loud and bright digital recording, the gated drums sound awful. The distorted, picked, trebbly bass sounds like something more fitting for a cybergrind album. This is more the bass I would expect from a prog metal band that has nothing but blast beats going on in the background, and yet this is literally how the bass frigging sounds.

The entire instrumental, which we have a moment to wallow in before the vocals come in, feels like I'm trying to just keep my hand on a hot stove or pan for as long as possible and just bite the bullet through the pain. It's just that loud and annoying to listen to.

The keys also sound very artificial and stale and lifeless, and the overall vibe is oppressive in a way that reminds me of older records like Pornography, but the music isn't quite as dark. Again, with the production being in the state that it is, I don't really want to be wrapped in this volume, in this vibe, in this energy. I just want it away from me.

Moving on from there, though, we have the lyrics, which for the most part are quite meta, with Robert reflecting on singing and communicating, emoting through his music. There seems to be a self-awareness of his place and The Cure's place in culture, in time. As a result, there's this preoccupation with things like the end and refusing to change.

Now, despite everything else on the track just not really being all that pleasurable to listen to. I will say the vocals, the singing is great. When it comes to singing ability and delivery, Robert Smith seems to have just not really missed a beat in all these years. I mean, he sounds much the same way he did when The Cure last had new music out. I'm actually impressed and surprised with what sounds like, I guess, an organic presentation of the vocals because with how everything else sounds on this recording.

Most definitely, the band could have done a project here where they were just touching up and dolling up the vocals to the point where they sounded fake as hell and weird and awkward. But no, that is not the case. Robert seems to take great pride in the way his vocals sound, and they sound good.

The track also has a very linear song structure, a slow burning pace, which for The Cure conceptually is nothing new. Lots of great tracks in the Cure catalog that run down that progression. What makes those moments in The Cure discography so compelling, usually, are the lyrics, are Robert's emotive vocal performance, and we certainly have those.

But also what's key is just the super subtle nuance changes that you get in the performance of the band and in the instrumental along the way. And with the mix being as claustrophobic and as aggressive and as cluttered as it is, not only esthetically does it sound horrible to the point where I don't really want to eat up those nuances and those subtleties and those changes. But a lot of them, I feel like, fly by or are mostly unnoticeable because, again, of how loud the whole damn thing is.

Unfortunately, while I do think there is a lot of merit to this track on the singing front, on the theme front when it comes to the topics being addressed in the lyrics, musically and especially esthetically and instrumentally, I just find this song to be a big, big, big disappointment. I am not looking forward to hearing other tracks that are mastered just as awfully as this one is. Hopefully, that's not the case. Fingers crossed.

But yeah, those are my thoughts on that. Let me know yours in the comments, please.

Anthony Fantano. New track. Alone. Forever.