Yep, this really is a cover of the Xtina song…

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Anthony Easton: When did “Hurt” become the new “Hallelujah”? Also, why are my favourite songs about BDSM being co-opted by middle of the road pop stars? Which X-Factor star is going to perform Lady Godiva’s “Operation” next? 
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Iain Mew: The spooky piano owes much more to the original than to the Cash version. That’s surprise enough, but together with Leona’s voice it helps to place an emphasis on a kind of numb dread (rather than creepiness or sadness) which makes her take add something worthwhile of its own. At least for a while — once it inevitably leaps up a gear it sounds like empty triumphalism and the words no longer mean much. The guitars think she’s still covering Snow Patrol.
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Brad Shoup: An embarrassing attempt to catch some thirdhand shine off the original Man in Black: Trent Motherfucking Reznor.
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Zach Lyon: I hope this is a big hit, if only to further enrage the NiN diehards whose brains explode when someone claims Cash wrote it.
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Katherine St Asaph: There’s a case to be made, and a lot of bros would love if you made it, that “Hurt” is Leona Lewis’ grand foray into trollgaze. It only is if you’re specific: she’s trolling everyone who thinks a) an X Factor winner, b) a woman, c) a pop artist and d) someone who sings with melisma is incapable of delivering emotion or selling a song.
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Edward Okulicz: A big power ballad cover of “Hurt” is actually a pretty good idea, and it’s to Lewis’s credit that she almost pulls it off. That’s one versatile set of pipes she’s got, not that we needed reminding. What keeps her version down is the arrangement; the stark piano is faithful to the original, the big wall of guitars is incongruous and jarring, which would be fine if it was flattering or powerful, and it’s neither. It’s like Leona Lewis and her producers have a big button in the studio that grants a one-size-fits-all, generic mega-ballad treatment to anything they desire. That worked brilliantly on “Run,” but as Johnny Cash’s cover showed, a great cover needs to be tailored to the song as well as the singer. This only gets the second part of that process right.
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Jonathan Bogart: Look. I love the Johnny Cash version. I called it one of the hundred best songs of the 2000s, and I stand by that. (I have no opinion of the Nine Inch Nails version. I’m sure I’ve heard it.) But I think a lot of people have fundamentally misunderstood the Johnny Cash version; he didn’t just turn it into a Johnny Cash song, a song which would forever be exclusively identified with his personal history and mythos and end-of-life narrative. He turned it into a song, and so set it free, rather than leaving it yoked to the millstone of a single definitive recording. But all of that’s only to explain why it’s okay for Leona Lewis to sing it in the first place; why I gave it the score I did below is something else. Part of it is that I have become, unexpectedly, a Leona Lewis fan; not only does she have a superb voice and astonishing control over it (she always had that), but she’s created a niche for herself as the darkest and depressingest, the most operatically concerned with metaphors of violence and destruction, major pop star in the world today. I don’t know or care what her visual presentation is: the sonics are pure gothic theatricality, with her too-rich, throb-sobbing voice as the central pillar in a cathedral of gloom. The arrangement here insists on that gloom, with the destabilizing assonance that keeps ending the piano lines ensuring that on a purely twentieth-century-music-history level, this version is more avant-garde than either Cash’s or Reznor’s. She elides half a verse in order to do away with the false martyrdom and focus purely on the pain at the center of the song. That’s not a hack singer’s move; that’s an interpreter’s move. I hope she does a whole album of covers like this one.
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