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Mon 7 September 2026 17:30, UK
To the casual listener, a curious dip into The Cure’s early 1980s material will likely shock anybody expecting ‘The Lovecats’.
For good reason, frontman Robert Smith has always detested the goth tag. The Cure were not a band to pompously dwell in the shadows their entire career; indeed, one can find ‘The Walk’s’ chirpy electro-pop, Smith donning polka dot shorts and playing with kittens in the aforementioned ‘The Lovecats’ video, or playing the starry-eyed romantic in ‘Just Like Heaven’s shimmering indie twirl.
Yet, the goth labels plague the band for good reason. As well as their penchant for introspective alternative rock for much of their 21st-century output, and 1989’s gloomy masterstroke Disintegration standing tall as their apex record, the triptych of LPs that opened the 1980s earned The Cure a well-deserved status in the post-punk world as arch-miserablists.
Each album entry flashed a distinct sonic flair: 1980’s Seventeen Seconds all taut and spiky minimalism, 1981’s Faith fogged in a funeral shroud, and 1982’s Pornography a cavernous bludgeon of cacophonous dread.
It took one album for co-producer Mike Hedges to call it quits in the studio with The Cure, but not for a lack of results or personal conflict. Seventeen Seconds stood as a gem of the new wave era, yielding the immortal ‘A Forest’ and the band’s most exemplary single from the pre-big hair and lippy era and charged with Smith and Hedges’ expertly focused aural austerity. It was 1981’s Faith follow-up that saw the producer decide to call it a day, despite such artistic heights.
“It was so introspective and so depressing, it did us all in, Hedges reflected to Sound on Sound in 2004, “It was a dark, dark, dark record, and when you work on something like that you’re not laughing and smiling the whole time. You get heavily affected by the music, and by the time we finished it, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
“God, was I depressed,” he added, “I mean, we didn’t fight or anything in the studio. It was just bloody miserable. You know, we’d have a drink and relax between sessions, but we took the recordings themselves very seriously. Robert had a cathartic outpouring of emotions on that album, and because of that, it affected all of us.”
Further reading: From The Vault
During these early years for The Cure, Smith was well-known for a morose reputation on stage and in the studio. Such a determined dark mood among the band alienated keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, who saw the writing on the wall and made an exit after 1980’s world tour; Hartley’s intuitions weren’t wrong. Eventually released in April the next year, Faith would deliver an arresting but rewarding experience, with two cuts like ‘Primary’ and ‘Other Voices’ at urgent odds with the album’s otherwise sombre and elegiac atmosphere that borrowed much of the arcane wanderings of Joy Division’s ‘The Eternal’ and ‘Decades’ from Closer.
For such a dour LP, Faith would stand as The Cure’s highest-charting album yet at number 14, and set the stage for Pornography’s nihilistic endgame in 1982. In one of the sharpest stylistic U-turns in music history, Smith steered the band from Gothic coven aggression to the frothy pop silliness of ‘Let’s Go to Bed’ mere months later.
