In 1980, Robert Smith invents unprecedented textures that lay the groundwork for The Cure’s sound, amniotic and deleterious, on a record that remains profoundly moving to this day.
From Seventeen Seconds, Robert Smith undertakes a singular approach that stages his own disappearance. This album is indeed the starting point of a triptych in which the singer gradually orchestrates his total erasure as an artist, singer and musician. And, in doing so, he begins to discover his first true illuminations as a composer.
Seventeen Seconds is thus the first album on which The Cure begins to live outside of any preexisting idiom: here, any pop attempt seems deliberately annulled, banished from any composition. The album stages the beginnings of a different pop, fundamentally amniotic and deleterious, resolutely oriented toward the absence of ego in favor of the reappearance of feeling.
The Cure Unintentionally Inaugurates a Genre, New Wave
Robert Smith begins to sing from afar, burying his voice behind the guitars and the reverberated basses. His voice, becoming a hollow instrument among all the others, reveals itself as a vector of troubled emotions, existential questions, and all the issues that fill the hearts and minds of sensitive teenagers. In this sense, Seventeen Seconds is more than an album; it is a stretched-out mirror: Robert Smith does not present himself as the artist, the idol, or the exemplary figure, but as the reflection of those who listen, of those who are willing to lend an ear to catch fragments of his haunted words.
Under a dusky cover, The Cure thus unintentionally inaugurated a genre, the new wave, which would build their musicality and their mythos by misreading the modesty of Seventeen Seconds. For on this record, still incredibly moving, there is not a single unnecessary note, unlike the albums of the group’s imitators. And when the track that closes the album and gives it its title ends with a few dry notes repeated to extinction, you are, each time, left with a mind inevitably altered, no longer truly knowing who, the band or the listener, has definitively fallen silent.
