Seventeen Seconds

Michael Dempsey left after disliking Smith's demos. Smith said Dempsey wanted the band to be XTC part 2, while he wanted them to be the Banshees part 2. Smith wrote most of the record at his parents' home on a Hammond organ with a built-in tape recorder, and listened to Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, Hendrix, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Bowie's Low. He called it the most personal record the band had ever done.

The sessions ran from 13 to 20 January 1980 on a budget of two to three thousand pounds, with the band working sixteen or seventeen hours a day. The Final Sound was meant to be much longer but was cut to 53 seconds when the tape ran out. The album reached number twenty in Britain and did not enter the US chart until September 2020, when it reached 186. NME's Nick Kent heard a far more mature Cure, while AllMusic's Chris True found it more rigid in sound and more disciplined in attitude. The authors of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die praised its beguiling bleakness.

It was recorded at Morgan Studios. The writing is shared by Smith, Gallup, Tolhurst and Hartley, with Hedges and Mike Dutton as engineers and Andrew Warwick and Nigel Green as assistant engineers. In 2024 the Guardian's Alexis Petridis ranked In Your House twelfth among the band's twenty greatest songs, calling it morose, hypnotic and eerie in equal measure. When the band launched Songs of a Lost World at the Troxy, they played half of this album as an encore.