Seventeen Seconds

Lore & Background

At the end of the Cure's 1979 UK tour supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees, Robert Smith spoke less and less with bassist Michael Dempsey. Early versions of "Play for Today" and "M" had been performed at a few concerts, but Dempsey did not like the new musical direction. Smith commented: "I think the final straw came when I played Michael the demos for the next album and he hated them. He wanted us to be XTC part 2 and – if anything – I wanted us to be the Banshees part 2. So he left." Smith would go on to say that "Seventeen Seconds was the most personal record that we’ve ever done, strangely enough." Playing guitar with the Banshees for two months opened up another horizon to Smith. "It allowed me to think beyond what we were doing. I wanted to have a band that does what Steven Severin and Budgie do, where they just get a bassline and the drum part and Siouxsie wails." Smith was also particularly influenced by Nick Drake, Pink Floyd, and Captain Beefheart at the time. The records to which Smith was frequently listening during composition were Five Leaves Left by Nick Drake, Isle of Wight by Jimi Hendrix, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and Low by David Bowie. Smith wrote the lyrics and music for most of the record at his parents' home, on a Hammond organ with a built-in tape recorder. Two members of the Magazine Spies, bass guitarist Simon Gallup and keyboardist Matthieu Hartley, were added to the band's lineup. Gallup replaced Dempsey, which relieved Smith as he felt Dempsey's basslines were too ornate. Hartley's synth work added a new dimension to the band's newly ethereal sound, although he would later clash with Smith over complexity; Hartley enjoyed complex chords but Smith wanted single notes.

Reader's Guide

Seventeen Seconds has been retrospectively considered an early example of gothic rock. Its "gloomscapes" are considered to be "a sonic touchstone" for the forthcoming movement. The track "The Final Sound" is "so positively gothic you could almost be fooled into believing that it was lifted from the soundtrack of some Hammer horror gorefest." The album has also been described as new wave and dark wave. The album's songs have been described by critics as featuring vague, often unsettling lyrics and dark, spare, minimalistic melodies. Some reviewers, such as Nick Kent of NME, felt that Seventeen Seconds represented a far more mature Cure, who had come very far musically in less than one year. Ian Cranna of Smash Hits wrote that the band were creating more ambitious music, while still retaining their "powerful melodic intensity." Chris Westwood of Record Mirror was less enthusiastic, viewing the album as "a sidewards step" rather than a progression; he found the material "biteless, a bit distant," showcasing a "reclusive, disturbed Cure, sitting in cold, dark, empty rooms, watching clocks." Simon Reynolds said the album was "translucent-sounding," with shades of the Durutti Column, Young Marble Giants and Another Green World by Brian Eno. AllMusic writer Chris True said that while Seventeen Seconds had come to be largely overlooked in later years apart from its single "A Forest," it nonetheless represented an important development for the Cure, capturing them becoming "more rigid in sound, and more disciplined in attitude." Seventeen Seconds was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2020, Rolling Stone included Seventeen Seconds in their "80 Greatest albums of 1980" list.

Did You Know?

• The album was recorded and mixed in just seven days, between 13 and 20 January 1980, on a budget of between £2,000 and £3,000.
• The track 'The Final Sound' was cut to 53 seconds because the tape ran out during recording and the band could not afford to record it again.
• Seventeen Seconds charted in the United States for the first time in September 2020, debuting at No. 186 on the Billboard 200.