The Cure “Seventeen Seconds” released 42 years ago tomorrow, April 22nd, 1980. Fiction Records. Today, April 21st, is The Cure’s mastermind Robert Smith’s birthday (b. 1959). Seventeen Seconds is The Cure’s second LP, the first to feature Simon Gallup on bass after original bassist Michael Dempsey’s departure; they also added Matthieu Hartley on keyboards (both were formerly in the post punk band Magazine Spies). Infused with dark, ambient “gloomscapes,” Seventeen Seconds is widely considered to be one of the first goth rock albums. One reviewer says about “The Final Sound,” [it is] “so positively gothic you could almost be fooled into believing that it was lifted from the soundtrack of some Hammer horror gorefest.”

I absolutely adore Seventeen Seconds and vividly recall the first time I heard the single “A Forest” (#31 UK), sometime in the early-to mid-80’s on an old King Biscuit Flour Hour radio show recording, probably rebroadcast on a local college station. I was totally transfixed: blown away by the music’s ability to bring up feelings and experiences that I had in no way ever experienced (I would have been about 12 or 13 years old with zero concept of what “goth” was. Up to that point my reflections on forests included Girl Scout camp, which I loved, and picking berries or looking for rare flowers with my mom, which I hated – bugs, mud, getting scratched by pickers and branches, etc). My other favorite songs are “Play For Today,” the darkly jangled “M” and the title track “Seventeen Seconds.” Seventeen Seconds went to #20 in the UK and 40 years after its release, squeaked onto the US charts at #186 in 2020.