• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Mar 26, 2025 Issue #74 - The Protest Issue with Kathleen Hanna and Bartees Strange By Ben Jardine

The new full-length from English goth-rock outfit, The Horrors, is their first in eight years. That’s enough time to change a band and their sound, even if you don’t account for the significant lineup changes they’ve undergone since 2017’s V. Gone are founding ​​keyboardist Tom Furse and drummer Joe Spurgeon, and in their place are The Ninth Place’s Amelia Kidd and drummer Jordan Cook.

The new record, Night Life, is just as contemplative and dusky as its predecessors. It oozes cool: captured in bassist Rhys Webb’s grooves and vocalist Faris Badwan’s crooning delivery. But where the band’s previous work featured shoegazing synthesizers of a shimmering fashion, as if to elicit the quiet pre-dawn, Night Life represents the frenetic restlessness of insomnia. The new album is louder, sharper. It has something to say, a new leaf to turn over. The synthesizers carry a shattering, almost crunching effect, and Badwan’s vocal is just more constant and awake.

First single, “The Silence That Remains,” is by far the record’s most cohesive representation of the new sound: a mix of sinister, sawing synths, a propulsive bassline, and brooding lyrics (perfectly accompanied by Kidd) that depict aimlessness in the middle of the night. According to a statement from the band, it’s a “3 a.m. insomnia walk through the city, retracing our steps and putting the past to bed.” And they’ve done just that across this record’s nine tracks, but it’s a retracing that they seem to can’t shake. The 7-minute track “Lotus Eater,” for example, which, for its progressive soundscape-building and thumping beat, is all about yesterdays, how time is slipping away, how we should leave the past behind. “Trial By Fire” is an industrial, angsty track about the end of the world, which seems to deal with the same yesterday as the other tracks, but with more of a hedonistic bent.

Where the band used to lean into instrumental grooves, Night Life instead opts for more persistent vocals, which means the tracks can feel busy in their being alive, yet busy all-the same. (www.thehorrors.co.uk)

Author rating: 5.5/10