I feel Seventeen Seconds is one of few albums that genuinely achieved that.” From this point on, I thought that every album was going to be the last Cure album, so I always tried to make it something that would be kind of a milestone. Said Smith to Rolling Stone, “We honestly felt that we were creating something no one else had done. 44), and paving the way for The Cure’s relentless, almost stubborn evolution over increasingly successful subsequent albums, Faith (No. 20 in the U.K., easily toppling its comparatively upbeat predecessor (which had stalled at No.
Instead, Smith’s new songs took a turn toward the ethereal, maintaining almost skeletal, certainly minimalist arrangements, whether they were brief instrumentals (“A Reflection,” “Three,” “The Final Sound”), faux-mechanical pop (“Play for Today,” “At Night”), or morose, deliberate, protean goth-rockers (“Secrets,” “In Your House,” “M,” the title track).Īnd while all of these creative decisions seemed to fly in the face of commercial common sense, Seventeen Seconds went on to peak at a rather impressive No. Interestingly, Gallup’s dense, disciplined bass and Hartley’s keys weren’t employed to beef up The Cure’s sound on Seventeen Seconds – anything but!
tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees, during which Smith pulled double duty, stepping in for the Banshees’ departed guitarist’s John McKay each night on stage.įurthermore, while on the first album, Smith had ceded most of the decision-making to producer and Fiction label boss Chris Parry, this time he insisted on calling all the shots and co-producing with engineer Mike Hedges, all while replacing founding bassist Dempsey with Simon Gallup and recruiting keyboardist Matthieu Hartley. And yet, as the ensuing Seventeen Seconds would soon reveal, The Cure were already transitioning away from post-punk to new wave and gothic rock – an evolution at least partly inspired by their recent U.K.
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