Electric Sermons and Psychedelic Fire: The Cult’s Love at the Crossroads of Rock and Revelation
There is a strange thing that happens to bands who live too long in the underbelly of rock and roll—they either mutate into grotesque parodies of themselves or get swallowed whole by the machine they once sought to destroy. The Cult, that snarling, leather-clad beast of post-punk mysticism and molten hard rock, somehow managed to straddle both fates. But in 1985, they were a leaner, hungrier animal, perched at the precipice of worldwide dominance with Love, an album as enigmatic as the band itself.
The Cult weren’t just making music; they were summoning spirits. This wasn’t the guttural nihilism of punk, nor was it the faux-mysticism of later stadium rock. It was something more primal—a collision of the druidic, the gothic, and the electric. Ian Astbury, that wild-eyed, shamanistic frontman, howled incantations about love, revolution, and elemental forces, while Billy Duffy’s guitar shimmered and burned like a ritual fire at the heart of it all. Love was where The Cult found their stride, sharpening the jagged psychedelia of their early years into a shimmering, hypnotic groove. It was an album made for wide, barren landscapes and howling winds, and it still sounds like the kind of thing you’d hear blasting from a car speeding across some sunbaked desert at 2 AM.
Right from the needle drop, the record bristles with an electricity that feels both familiar and alien. Tracks like “Nirvana” and “Big Neon Glitter” pulsate with an eerie, spectral energy, shimmering in the kind of reverb-heavy production that was made for a smoke-choked club where time doesn’t exist. Jamie Stewart’s basslines lurk and slither beneath it all, while the drums crack like a doomsday clock counting down.
And then there’s that song.
“She Sells Sanctuary” is a thunderclap in a clear sky. It is the anthem that defines The Cult even as it transcends them—a perfect collision of urgency, mysticism, and raw, unrelenting energy. Duffy’s delay-drenched intro is a signal flare from another dimension, an invocation to something bigger than all of us. The rhythm section, tight and unyielding, turns the whole thing into a headlong rush into oblivion, while Astbury—part preacher, part madman—roars above it all like a man who has seen the face of God and come back with only riddles. This is not a song that you merely listen to. It grips you by the throat, pulls you into the fire, and leaves you dazed, baptized in its swirling, cathedral-sized haze. Decades later, it still sounds like it belongs to something greater than any one band, like it was channeled from some untapped reservoir of rock and roll purity.
The rest of Love is a masterclass in restrained power. “Rain” is a gothic incantation drenched in reverb and ritualistic drum patterns, while “Hollow Man” and “Revolution” play with space and tension, eschewing bombast for a creeping, hypnotic atmosphere. There’s an economy to this album that would soon disappear from The Cult’s playbook—no bloated excess, no indulgence, just tight, deliberate choices that serve the greater whole. Even when Astbury leans into his signature repetition (“Yeah! Yeah!” ad infinitum), it feels less like a lyrical crutch and more like an invocation, a rhythmic hammering of his message into the collective unconscious.
It’s important to consider Love in the grand, sprawling chaos of The Cult’s career. This was the moment before the breakneck left turn into Electric, before the AC/DC-ification of their sound, before the stadium rock madness of Sonic Temple. Love is the ghost at the feast—the last time the band felt fully untethered, existing in a liminal space between the goth underground and the coming hard rock superstardom. With this album, they weren’t yet prisoners of the industry’s demands, nor had they succumbed to the grotesqueries of excess that would later threaten to devour them whole. This was the Cult at their most elemental, tapping into something primal, something ineffable.
In retrospect, Love may be The Cult’s most honest moment—before they streamlined, before they chased the dragon of mass appeal. It remains, decades later, a monolith of mood and atmosphere, proof that rock and roll is at its best when it feels like something ancient, something discovered rather than created. This was the sound of a band on the edge of something huge, staring into the void and deciding, for one perfect moment, to dance in the flames rather than fall into them.