Faith by The Cure

Faith, the Cure's third album, came out on Fiction on 14 April 1981, and it wades even deeper into the grey mist of Seventeen Seconds. Keyboardist Matthieu Hartley had gone, leaving a stripped-down trio of Robert Smith, Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst, who co-produced it with Mike Hedges, and the space he left behind fills up with fog.

Gallup's bass leads the way, the drums trudge like a funeral march, and Smith's guitar and voice hover over the top, remote and grieving. Only "Primary", the single, breaks into a run, chasing its own tail through the murk. It's a beautifully bleak record, the middle chapter of a gloomy run that would close with Pornography, and it did well by the band, climbing to number fourteen in the UK.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.