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When listeners of The Cure hear the term 'trilogy,' their minds often jump to Pornography, Disintegration, and Bloodflowers, the trio of albums Robert Smith personally grouped for a special run of shows in the early 2000s. These records certainly echo with a melancholic beauty. However, the band’s most haunting and introspective journey, the real plunge into the darkness, was laid down earlier with Seventeen Seconds (1980), Faith (1981), and Pornography (1982), hence the original arc of emotional descent and inner reflection.
While the aforementioned trio of performed live albums also leans into introspection, the earlier set takes a far starker route, peeling away the layers of perseverance until all that remains is emptiness. It feels like staring into the silence.
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The journey began in 1980. Fresh off a record that highlighted their post punk base and sharpened songwriting, The Cure took a turn toward something more introspective. Their earlier work had flirted with darkness, but Seventeen Seconds plunged deeper into a realm of haunting restraint and emotional stillness. The album feels like the band experimenting with mood as a primary instrument, producing a sound that was skeletal and spectral. Robert Smith composed most of it at his parents’ house, using a Hammond organ with a built-in tape deck, which added a pure intimacy to the process. Tracks like A Forest and At Night thrive on the tension of silence, letting the empty spaces speak volumes. With Simon Gallup joining the lineup, the record gained a certain level of ethereality. It’s not yet absolute despair, but it’s certainly the walkway that leads there.
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Faith arrived just a year after Seventeen Seconds, and with it came a chilling sense of emotional surrender. It’s arguably The Cure’s most desolate release, not driven by rage or longing, but by a quiet, unshakable resignation. Songs like All Cats Are Grey and the title track drift through the air like fog, like the veiled picture of the Bolton Priory church on the cover, stripped of momentum, as if the band has already made peace with the void. This is the moment where their gothic identity truly takes shape. It's somber, stark, yet strangely grand. Like its predecessor, Faith is lean and concise, but it doesn’t take long to pull one into its shadowy embrace.
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And then came the detonation. Pornography is claustrophobic, violent, remorseless and seething. From the chilling opener, “It doesn’t matter if we all die,” the album plunges headfirst into a suffocating, relentless storm of sound and emotion. This is the sonic embodiment of psychological collapse. The drums pound like panic, the guitars grin, and Smith’s vocal rages. This wasn’t just a different chapter for The Cure or post punk as a whole, it was a complete rupture, dragging both the band and the genre into an unprocessed dimension of total despair.
If Seventeen Seconds welcomed the darkness and Faith gave in to its stillness, then Pornography is the moment everything collapses inward. It’s the sound of the walls closing in.
The grouping of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography is not simply a trilogy because that is how it was designated. It charts the course of a band that dares to enter the dark playground without turning around and feels inescapable.
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The Cure
Photo credits:
1980 by Ebet Roberts
1981 by Anton Corbijn
1982 by Michael Kostiff
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