The Cure song Robert Smith knew he’d never match again: “Will never be dislodged”
Considering how long and illustrious the career of The Cure has been, you’d think that a large amount of that is down to Robert Smith‘s eagerness to continue adding to the catalogue and aiming to keep improving the band’s output.
Forming way back in the late 1970s, the iconic gothic rock outfit made a solid impression on their first handful of releases, with debut album Three Imaginary Boys and its follow-up, Seventeen Seconds, both gaining plenty of attention for how they merged together elements of post-punk with moodier and more atmospheric undertones.
It was, however, on their third record, Faith, where the group truly hit their stride as a band who were capable of creating bodies of work that felt cohesive as overall entities that are meant to be listened to as one, rather than having just a strong selection of songs appearing on records.
That doesn’t mean that the tracks that made up their albums throughout the 1980s weren’t able to be taken out of context from wider releases, but their strength was certainly bolstered by how they nestled into tracklists, with the intentional placing of them always standing out and making every song seem so perfectly situated.
It’s fair to say that this does make it harder for individual tracks to stand out, but one particular song from this record has always made Smith feel proud for how perfectly he managed to capture every bit of emotion that he was experiencing at the time, and how it added an extra layer of of cohesion to the record as a whole by tying together all of the lyrical themes he was looking to explore on the release.
The title track, ‘Faith’, is situated as the closing statement on the record, and the way in which it explores Smith’s fractured relationship with his religious upbringing, and how he felt as though he had finally managed to rid himself of this aspect of his early life. As he questions his indoctrination and early encouragement to follow a specific belief system, using vivid and violent imagery to describe how he was sucked into this world during his naive younger years, he finally manages to shed himself of this burden, freeing himself from the grip of religion and attempting to find solace in his own beliefs.
He would later speak to Spin about the importance of the track, claiming that “[it] probably will never be dislodged from the place it occupies in my heart. For what it meant at the time.” As he tries to deliver a message of hope following several moments of despair on the record, he comes to terms with where he finds himself at this moment in time, and ‘Faith’ is almost an exorcism of a past that he was uncomfortable with.
Smith reinforced this opinion during an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1992, where he stated the continued importance of the song to him. “I don’t think I’ll ever write a song that’ll ever move me as much as ‘Faith’,” he argued, “That’ll change my life as much as that song did, or encapsulate a period of my life as well as that one does.”
While the band would, of course, go on to release plenty of better-known and more accessible songs later in their career, giving The Cure a greater deal of commercial success, ‘Faith’ does still stand out as being a poignant moment in their catalogue, and one where Smith truly captured his emotions in a way that felt cathartic.
