Alone

Premiered on BBC Radio 6 Music by Mary Anne Hobbs on 26 September 2024, it was written in 2019, and its lyric was inspired by Ernest Dowson's poem Dregs, which says every song we sing, we sing alone. Smith and Paul Corkett produced and mixed it. It runs 6:48, is in A minor at about 100 beats per minute, and has 3:21 of instrumental before the vocal.

The band first played it live on 6 October 2022 in Riga and opened every show of that tour with it. It reached number six on the UK Singles Sales chart and won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance in 2026. A Four Tet remix came out on Record Store Day on 12 April 2025.

Reviewing it for the Guardian on 26 September 2024, Alexis Petridis called it majestically wreathed in misery and despair. He noted that more than half of its nearly seven minutes is an instrumental introduction, in the manner of Plainsong, that the drums have no hi-hats, and that the lyrics seem to be based on Dowson's 1899 poem. Smith was 65 at the time. The same writer ranked Alone thirteenth among the band's best songs a month later, calling it powerful, elegiac and deeply moving.