The Horrors are back with a belter of a record. Don’t be fooled though, whilst this album might be the most challenging thing they’ve ever made, it also may be the poppiest. They’re back to their contradictory, dichotomous best and it’s wonderful to hear.
Luminous, the bands’ fourth album, was great but not on the same sonic level as Skying or Primary Colours. That being said, despite those nigh-on perfect second and third albums being fantastic, they don’t have the same consistent, marauding power that V has.
With their latest record, The Horrors have taken the aggression of their debut, Strange House, but reduced the showiness, channeling the kaleidoscope of influences on the middle three albums into a record that feels more mature, tighter, and more controlled: more Horrors.
Weird noises and textures are in there not just for show but because they aid the song. Never is this more pertinent than on possibly the best track on the record, ‘Machine’, which was the first single they released. ‘Machine’ is a crystallisation of all the best elements of V. It’s just so cool. It’s icy and metallic and unsettling, filled with sounds that seem to come from the earth itself. The song just sounds like a massive, well… machine, lumbering along a Mad Max-esque desert, clanking and juddering into the distance.
Heavy sound manipulation runs as a constant through V and lots of the tracks have a swelling and falling quality that comes from the interplay of various modular synths, textures, and Joe Spurgeon’s consistently excellent drum parts. The ten songs that make up the album sound like the cover’s aesthetic: each one of the member’s parts melding into the other, barely fitting into the contained space that they’ve established for themselves. Crucially, however, they do stay within the contained space. None of the tracks stray into the dreaded psychy ‘wig-out’ (I’ve never really understood that phrase). Apparently the opener, ‘Hologram’, was originally twenty five minutes long, which shows this album’s maturity. This track very much sets the tone for the harsh and abstract, but definitively pop, nature of the record. It swells and falls, it’s powerful and dark with Faris’s lament underpinning the whole track, asking us “Are we hologram? / Are we vision?” This track also has a synth line that James Murphy and Will Gregory would drool over.
The Horrors have always been a pop band for all their experimental posturing (not helped by the media who label them as some kind of modern La Monte Youngs or John Cages.) It’s not that they don’t experiment, it’s just they squeeze their experimentation into the liberating straitjacket of pop music. They may talk about the studio as ‘an extension of yourself’ and use all sorts of complicated weird equipment but they still stick in stadium-filling choruses on all the songs. This may be lightly influenced by the new producer, Paul Epworth, who’s worked with huge names such as Adele, Rihanna, and The Stone Roses.
Sometimes, however, I think this partnership stifles the album a little. ‘Gathering’ would have sounded great if it was recorded by The Horrors themselves in their own studio; it needs some crackles and grit. Don’t get me wrong, Epworth has done a fantastic job and on most tracks his production has been perfect. The album sounds amazing. It’s glassy and bright and bassy, but sometimes this takes some of the fun out of it. Part of the charm of Skying and Primary Colours is the every-so slightly faded, lo-fi feel to them. Of course, if a big-budget producer hadn’t been working on the album then huge works of sonic art like ‘Machine’ or ‘Hologram’ might have suffered, with intricate, delicate parts being lost. On a song such as ‘Gathering’, though, the band could have done with less production. I’m nit-picking really; for the most part this album is fantastic.
‘Gathering’ sounds like Grant Lee Buffalo in a lounge bar, and singer Faris Badwan brings out his Neil Tennant impression. Ace. Faris has made one of the best parts of the album the superb vocals. He’s transformed like a beautiful butterfly: from a snotty punk egg on Strange House, to a dusky murmuring caterpillar on Skying and Primary Colours, he unfortunately retreated within himself on Luminous, where he was a bit of a chrysalis, but now on V he’s kicked his way out of the pupa and become a strident, powerful vocalist who can skip from a beautiful baritone to a plaintive alto with one glint of his gimlet eye.
Lots of the songs start innocuously, take ‘Ghost’ or ‘Press Enter To Exist’ for instance. They start off fairly conventional but turn into utter beasts, something else entirely. ‘Ghost’ had me spitting my tea out when it gets to that bit. It’s got this gnarled and twisted beauty with a genuinely unsettling air. This album is the musical equivalent of a Francis Bacon painting. ‘Point of No Reply’ turns from a ‘Luminous’-esque pop song into a dark banger with splinters of sound swirling around.
There are weak points, however. ‘It’s a Good Life’ seems a little like an afterthought but my view might well change. One of the things I love about this band is that you can hear a new song and think ‘whatever, no big deal’, but give it a few weeks and it’ll turn into one of the classics; they’ve all got hidden depths. Initially I didn’t rate ‘World Below’ but now I think it’s one of the strongest tracks on the album. The tripping, lilting melody of the chorus is just pure pop and all the better for it – couple this with whining, shrieking synths and a Hardcore-esque middle eight that sounds a bit like the Prodigy at their ballsiest and you have a special, special song indeed.
I’d venture that there isn’t a bad song on this album. A month ago, I would have balked at this statement considering my thoughts on the second single and album closer ‘Something To Remember By’. I’ve done a complete U-turn on it. It’s irritatingly catchy and so so 80s but I just adore it; I don’t really know why. STRMB’s just a lovely over-produced sphere of perfect pop. It’s so un-Horrors that it has got fans’ backs up – which is precisely why it’s the perfect track to end on.
V is an unsettling album, but one that’s so rewarding at the same time. Many would agree that The Horrors are one of the best bands that the much-maligned 21st century has ever produced. V is a return to form. I completely agree with bassist, Rhys Webb, who said, “It’s our most experimental, but also our most accessible album”. They’ve combined pop sensibilities with a genuinely powerful and interesting experimental side and this is a hard thing to do. Everything is just more vital on this album, the best word I can use to sum up the whole thing is probably just pounding. ‘V’ is a great, gun-metal grey, stone obelisk huddling into the sky, I can’t wait to hear what they do next.
Words by Will Ainsley