This is the age of the homo saltanes – the man that dances, endlessly and boundlessly in ecstasy. The transgression of losing ourselves in electronic music have become a standardised cycle, a movement that has opened up to a dark abyss! A lot points to this: the way our society has accepted drugs as a welcome convenience, the division into day and night/weekday and weekend fostering parallel identities, the nihilistic apathy of late stage capitalism, the narcissistic death drive in a world that divides itself between the oh-so-cultured west and the Global South that faces genocides and disasters. We re-defined clubs into fast-food-like event spaces, where the kick has become to be let in, bouncers enacting a strange game of social darwinism that reflects racism and dominance, while on the inside, there’s needle spikes, overdoses and, in the darkest corners, unthinkable acts of sexual soul cannibalism. Every night starts with a promise, and some hours later, it ends with a void.
The Horrors have always reflected on the macabre side of music, the potential held within the decades they reflected on. Freak beat, shoegaze, post-punk, psychedelic rock, Brit-pop, Krautrock – like alchemists, they would distill the beauty of those genres into collage pieces, only to unleash a torrent of madness and monstrosities that came in the shadows of those moments. They played with this image, dialled it up and down, reconfigured themselves, matured. Fashion had always been an element to this, but then the contradictions between embodiment and experience were always central to their interests.
At some point, the grip loosened. 2014’s Luminous seemed like a retread of the superior Skying, missing its biting edges. In the last 10 years, the band released only one album: the 90s infused V, which returned to their interests of textures and surprising genre experimentation. Then came a sudden explosion during the lockdown, with two short extended plays, Lout and Against the Blade, presenting a corrosive mixture of industrial noise rock, cyber-metal and techno. Immensely infectious, those tracks seemed harbingers of a new age for The Horrors, abandoning the psychedelic, trance-like atmospheres that had characterised their past three albums.
And then, suddenly, things changed. “Coffin Joe” Spurgen and Tom Furse left the band, shortly after the two EPs. This is a significant loss: The Horrors always were a particularly tight unit of curators and composers. These aren’t five musicians who just happened to start a band, but a group of archivists, scientists and academics, practitioners in a culture they wanted to engulf themselves in, to leave an indelible mark. Anyone who has met these guys can attest to that. Removing one piece from this would mean slashing a limb – but two!?
The genesis of Night Life can only be interpreted as a brazen, defiant rebellion against this shock: vocalist Faris Badwan and multi-instrumentalist (but mostly bassist, organist and sensitive mood-compass) Rhys Webb hunkered down in Los Angeles, all on their own, to record – guitarist Joshua Hayward was left in the UK, adding final touches when the band returned to London. Amelia Kidd of The Ninth Wave joined in the meantime, with Jordan Cook rounding out the line-up as new drummer for the upcoming shows – but really, Night Life is mostly the record of Faris and Rhys. The album presents semi-electronic hymns of a dark, dystopian cityscape: Canary Wharf via Hollywood. More nuanced and less abrasive than Lout and … Blade, the record comes across as a lush vista of clean surfaces and inorganic textures, in equal measures optimistic, lonely, frightening.
The latter comes in two songs that return to the somewhat industrial tone of the EPs, but lean further into synth dominated cyber metal: “Silent Sister” and “Trial by Fire” sound – aesthetically and in terms of Faris’ voice – surprisingly close to post-Millennial Marilyn Manson, to a point of confusion. Everyone in music journalism has at least three stories on Manson and his LA exploits are widely documented by word-of-mouth, so in a way, it’s almost logical that The Horrors would use his template to conjure images of an urban creeper: “As I walk through the blacked out valley / With a soul I could never disguise […] / Black hymns in the land of the living / Or lullabies in the world of the blind / No rest in this tortured landscape / I’ll never sleep in your world or mine”. “Silent Sister” is the more dynamic one of the two, with “Trial by Fire” the more sleazy, bluesy track. “You know you and I have the same blood”, snarls Faris in the latter, reconnecting with the gothic garage-dandy libido of the band’s debut album, Strange House. But “Trial by Fire” also anticipates the other main influence on the album: post-heroin Depeche Mode.
The atmospheric Exciter and the grungy Ultra (possibly the best Depeche Mode album) documented Dave Gahan’s return from death after a 1996 speedball overdose in LA’s Sunset Marquis Hotel. It’s impossible not to think of their sinister atmospheres, or Gahan’s lascivious vocal tone, when accessing Night Life. Especially “The Feeling is Gone” sounds like a direct DM homage, and both “Ariel” and “When the Rhythm Breaks” are injected with the familiar, clerical tone that is a staple of the Gore/Gahan brilliance. And it makes sense – both groups are ultimately from Essex, both explored Los Angeles after a breaking point and both have vocalists of mixed-race (Gahan’s father is Malaysian, Faris’ father is Palestinian).
It’s even evident when The Horrors return to their familiar territory of cavernous post-punk grooves, as on “The Silence That Remains”, which has a hint of Songs of Faith and Devotion to it. To clarify: this is very much a compliment. The group manages to retain their signature identity, with Kidd’s occasional background singing, chopped vocal samples and glitching, stuttering keyboard effects adding a new, pleasant element of diffusion. The Horrors have always been revisionists, so references and comparisons seem nothing but fair.
And – after the first spin or two were rather disappointing – the music of Night Life also proved itself with time: the album is a grower. There’s few songs here that resembles each other, as the band cut it at nine tracks. The sonic interests of the past albums are clearly visible – it could even be argued that this is the best sounding album the group has produced in the 14 years since Skying. There’s a rich compositional density in the individual elements and production values, which build on each other to form complex art pieces.
This becomes especially evident on the album’s standout track “Lotus Eater”. Comprised of atmospheric ambient techno, the song sounds inherently ‘Berlin’. Faris meditates on death, as he reflects on the inevitable: “Putting a name to the darkness / That occupies my heart / All this decay washed away by the rain / Moving back inside / Into my memory / Moving into the light”. It’s an incredibly gifted, emotional song that moves through multiple sections of thudding techno beats. Paralleling the movements of the living body (heart beating, blood rushing, lungs breathing), it connects to the interests shoegaze had in electronic music as pure mood, traced all the way to Slowdive’s 5 EP and Seefeel’s Quique. But even when the band leans further into their familiar territory of lush psychedelic rock, such as on the optimistic “More Than Life” and “LA Runaway”, the songs never feel cheap, constrained or cliched. Nostalgic, yes, but this is far from a gurgling midlife crisis.
“Ariel” and “The Silence that Remains” are further evidence that the band is far from getting boring. Both have a luxurious, gothic tone, as if Nosferatu found his way to the present day. Especially in “Ariel”, this undead, walking shade presents itself: “In this world of silent winterscapes / All dreams hang unseen in the air / And every hollow cross we carry through our lives / Drags on our backs beneath the sun”. David Bowie connected the images of vampires and dance floors for “Beat of Your Drum”, in his skilled hand becoming the tale of a middle aged Rockstar with Lolita-like obsessions – a precognition of the coming Marilyn Mansons. In “Ariel”, Faris is closer to Dracula’s cyclical obsession with reincarnation: “Then you come back to me in scattered gold, I am blinded / And I feel the distance fall away”, he sings, before bursting into flames! “The Silence that Remains” turns the vampire into a club zombie, a female presence that exists in perpetual distance. “Walking the length of the city like a child / Waiting for the call, searching the streets for directions / The endless life, emotion never shown / You need all these things, waits to help you better win”, Faris sings, documenting the body for an absent lover, finally exploding into the naked mantra of “So why, why that distance grows?”
And still, with all that praise, Night Life remains in a state of feeling unfinished, unfocused. Transient, transitioning, maybe even transparent at times: it drifts by, shows a group seeking a new identity, not fully borne into a solid body. This is not the same band as on V or Luminous. The Horrors are not as confident or self-assured as familiar. The brazen minimalism of “Lotus Eater” anticipates a different work, almost one that exists fully in the obligatory ‘Kid A-modus’ of reinvention as abstract avant-garde. But this gives way for a particularly intriguing horror story. The homo saltanes that this album imagines is, himself, confused and broken, an undead shade struggling to be seen and held. The club, the streets of LA, become his haunted castle, hallways echoing with half-remembered moans of female voices, rooms decorated with half-torn posters of Dave Gahan and Marilyn Manson. The air is heavy, and the smell of sweat antagonises his nose, mocking him with memories of living. This is the final, sinister punchline. The night is alive, as the dead scream in agony.
