Looking back on a decade of releases, the Horrors have mostly endured their name, rather than embodying it. A knowing nod to their favorite schlocky 1960s bands—the Monks, the Sonics, Screaming Lord Sutch—at first it suited them as back-combed, kohl-lined stickmen hailed by the British music press as saviors of garage rock. But when they returned with their second album, the shimmering, krautrock-tinged Primary Colours, the Horrors had become a very different band. Their sound has only grown more polished, euphoric, and populist since, on 2011’s Skying and its similarly glowing follow-up, Luminous, which cracked the UK top 10.
The band were barely college age at the time of their scratchy garage-rock debut album, 2007’s Strange House, and so obviously precocious—particularly bassist and keyboardist Rhys Webb, the mod and psych aficionado growing a collection of vintage synths, and guitarist Josh Hayward, the physics grad with a knack for homebrewed guitar pedals—that they were bound to move on to headier influences. My Bloody Valentine, Can, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and the Cure all became touchstones for a studio-forged sound that has occasionally been criticized as “record collectors’ rock”—a tasteful blend of retro influences that hardly inspires much in the way of horror. So after three albums in that vein, perhaps it’s no surprise that the next stage in their evolution entails the familiar rock‘n’roll journey back to their roots. “We wanted to get nasty,” says Webb of the new record, “and make something that sounded quite horrible and quite unsettling again.”
Any band looking to do that within the parameters of soaring, arena-ready rock could do worse than look to Depeche Mode and the Cure for pointers, and the brooding grandeur of those alternative-pop godheads looms large over V. The band’s basic formula—simple, languid melodies, traditional verse-chorus structures interrupted by guitar and synth wig-outs—hasn’t changed, but the surfaces are grittier, the drums smack harder, and the vocals sit louder in the mix. It’s the first time since Primary Colours that they’ve enlisted an outside producer, handing the job to Paul Epworth, the British studio veteran who’s worked with Adele, Coldplay, and indie heavy hitters like Bloc Party and Florence and the Machine. As a band of accomplished studio nerds, they seem to have tapped Epworth not so much for his production skills as his ear for a huge hit, and on the album’s most anthemic tracks, it’s down to Faris Badwan—previously a slippery, mumbling presence both on- and off-stage—to carry it off. You can almost feel him squirming under Epworth’s gaze.
The opening “Hologram” apparently started out as a 25-minute ambient house track, and its transformation is indicative of the band’s new direction. Psychedelic yet immediate, “Hologram” swaggers forward in a blaze of strobing Tubeway Army synths and cavernous 1980s drums—a very different welcome statement from the three minutes of airy, Tangerine Dream-like noodling that opened Luminous. From there, “Press Enter to Exit” combines submerged dub rock with a feather-light vocal and lashings of post-production faff—haywire electronics, false endings, what sounds like a doorbell—and ends up sounding a bit like late-1990s Ian Brown. “Machine,” the first single, emerges from a tangle of knackered drum machines and white noise that threatens to get really weird, only to resolve into a throbbing S&M groove, a grungy rock moment that guyliner-era Dave Gahan would approve of. And on “Ghost,” a shuddering wall of sound almost recalls Mogwai at their most stately.
Halfway in, there’s no doubt that it all sounds great—but what’s it actually about? Badwan’s lyrics, though more audible than ever, remain frustratingly opaque. “There’s only so far that the eye can see,” he murmurs, as if reciting random scraps from his diary. “Are we hologram? Are we vision?” he ponders. “Breathe your blood diamonds, lifetime is drawing in.” Even with a sharpened focus on punchy hooks and melodies, the band’s potential is scuppered by a basic lack of content. Badwan’s voice is actually stronger than ever, if still a bit drippy and flat in that British art-rock way. But precious few of his lyrics really resonate—he never really exposes himself, never confides in us. As any mega-fan of Depeche Mode or the Cure could tell you, that can be the difference between a band you like and a band you love—a band you’d drive 500 miles to see live, a band whose lyrics you get tattooed on your shoulder. The darkness has to ring true.
The foot comes off the pedal for “Point of No Reply,” a coasting, deceptively chill groove which bemoans a mystery woman “with an eye for revenge.” “You tell your friends I hit you,” Badwan adds, one of the few lines that’s unsettling enough to be memorable. The album’s second half also contains its anthemic pinnacle, “Weighed Down” (“Don’t let love bring you down,” Badwan repeats, as freeways crumble apart and the earth splits in two behind him) and a pair of melodramatic ballads: “Gathering” bolsters its strummed guitars with sweeping strings in a ‘90s Britpop manner, while “It’s a Good Life” would be unremarkable without the knowledge that it’s written about the late Peaches Geldof, whom Badwan briefly dated. “She lay in the dark, but I don’t know who found her,” he sings, imagining the hours after her death, in a rare, unguarded moment.
V ends on a lighters-in-the-air moment with the pounding, sun-blinded euphoria of “Something to Remember Me By,” a finale that channels the saucer-eyed grandeur of main-stage New Order and confirms V as the Horrors’ most ambitious album to date. At the same time, it feels like a wasted arsenal of almost-brilliant songs, a record that lacks the essential quirk found in so many of the band’s touchstones. The Horrors sound more horrible than they have in a long time—but to send a shiver down our spines, they need to convince us it’s all real.
