Hurts latest album Faith takes their theatrical electropop style and applies it to a moody-rock backdrop. Their fifth album’s dark aesthetic comes off well timed in the quarantine era, where each introspective song reverberates with an existential loneliness. Throughout the lyrics of Faith, they pray that a romantic relationship will bring out the best of them, and occasionally reach out to a distant and absent god for solace.
Hurts can be considered a more experienced and UK-bred version of Imagine Dragons, as both bands perform in an epic style apt for cinema and trailers. While retaining the band’s overarching theme of power ballads, Hurts has shifted the genre of their latest album to give their large fan base a wounded vein of theirs to explore. With their latest collaboration, Hurts is searching for beauty among rapidly decaying circumstances, hoping that love can be the lifeline to rescue them.
Appealing to one of the oldest universal desires, Faith calls out often to the suffering endured to maintain love. Songs such as “Suffer,” “Slave to Your Love,” “All I Have to Give,” and “Somebody” find the band stuck in a cycle of being drawn to a significant other they have history with, while being tempted to drop the whole affair and find somebody else. Early in the album, singer Theo Hutchcraft belts, “And play me like you play your twisted little symphony / ‘Cause I’m just addicted to you.” Later he sings, “I’m gonna find somebody / To treat me better than you.” Faith balances on a tightwire of this tension, emotionally battling with questions of whether the fight is even worth it anymore or is it time to cut ties and spend their care and attention more prosperously elsewhere.
When not focusing on love, Hurts aims their neurosis inward on songs such as “Voices,” “Fractured,” “Numb,” and “Redemption”. The earlier portion of the album deals with being torn in many directions, while later in the album, exhausted and worn down, Hurts submits to help and hope. Faith is an album to turn inward to, submerging into one’s dark moods rather than dancing out the funk as they have done on previous albums.
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