HMLTD - Fangs HMLTD

“In the gothic canon, the vampire is defined by two characteristics. Firstly, its ontology: the Vampire is neither alive nor dead, but a secret third category: undead. Secondly, its means of reproduction: in order to sustain its undeadness, the Vampire is locked into an endless cycle of consumption. It produces nothing. It consumes, therefore it is.” To the extent that we have nothing to live for, and yet nothing worth dying for, and to the extent that our lives are increasingly defined and mediated by consumption, is the condition of the modern individual under late capitalism not precisely the condition of Vampirism?

This is the question HMLTD pose on their new album, FANGS. The sonic counterpart to this enquiry is what the band claim is their own new genre: Götherdammerüng (An allusion to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, or ‘Twilight of the Gods’. In HMLTD’s reading, this becomes a ‘Twilight of the Goths.’), or - less verbosely - ÜberGöth. Predictably unpredictable, this new sound could not be further away from the band’s last outing, 2023’s rock opera The Worm. On FANGS, the sixteen-piece orchestra of The Worm has been traded in for Ableton, the timpani’s and violins replaced with side-chained four-to-the-floor and rave synths, and the gospel choir swapped for guttural gothic howling and black metal screams. The result is both unique and terrifying: a total reinvention and rehabilitation of the goth genre, through the looking glass of modern electronic and doomscroll-era dance music.

In many ways a return to the band’s origins as purveyors of violent, genre-pushing experimentation and avant-garde provocation, this latest volte-face was also born of necessity. FANGS is HMLTD’s third official album, but in a sense it is also their fourth. As lead singer Henry Spychalski explains, “Soon after The Worm, we spent a full year - and virtually the entirety of the advance given us by our label - making an ‘indie’ album about a particularly traumatic breakup I went through.” Recorded entirely as a traditional band with drums, guitar, bass and vocals, upon completing the record, the group found themselves with an album they hated. “It embodied everything we have always been against, artistically and philosophically: safeness, obviousness, conservatism, not to mention self-pity. For us, art should be revolt: a contra, an against. And if it isn’t at least trying to be new, then what’s the point?”

Having spent a whole year and most of their advance making it, the third album was deleted. “We went back to square one, with zero songs and next to zero budget.” These limitations soon became their creative parameters: “we were forced to return to a DIY approach; in so doing, we rediscovered what made the band special in the first place: violent confrontation, radical experimentation, and the refusal to abide by genre.” This new beginning was accompanied and encouraged by a change in personnel, with Theo Spark (of Skinship) and Andrei Martynchyk (formerly of noise-electronic touring partners Silkarmour) joining the fray alongside original members Spychalski and Duc Peterman.

With work starting in Martynchyk’s Farringdon basement studio, the band soon decamped to a ruined chateau in the Loire Valley. “Besides leaving once a week for supplies, we didn’t see or speak to anyone else the whole time we were there” they claim. Cabin fever took hold, and - inspired by their gothic surroundings - the band became obsessed with vampire lore, and the EBM and goth sound that had inspired much of their early work: artists like Fad Gadget, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Bauhaus. Indeed, musically, FANGS obviously owes at least as much of its musical DNA to those early pioneers as it does to more contemporary influences like Crystal Castles, German hardcore, 2000s blog-house a la Justice, and 2020s sleazepop. One such major influence - cult French goth outfit Corpus Delicti - even feature on the trip-hop-goth closing track, ‘Sorry for Laughing’ - its title itself a callback to Scottish post-punk band, Josef K.

It was during this sojourn that the lyrical and conceptual framework of the album also took shape. Plunging himself into a diet of 19th century gothic literature and what he describes as ‘schizoid philosophy’ (Evola, Bataille, Land, CCRU), Spychalski jokes that it’s like he was trying to give himself a mental breakdown. It was worth it. The world crafted in FANGS is a rich one, full of cosmic pessimism, glowing horror, imperceptible evil and digital dismemberment, ancient curses and ruined castles, Vampires. Inspired by Italian occult collective, Gruppo Di Nun, Spychalski cites the idea of ‘Gothic Insurrection’ as a particularly influential concept. For him, this means “resurrecting the ghosts that modernity attempted to bury: plague pits, witches, Vampires, as a means of mapping the new demons created by capital.”

One could be forgiven for missing these highfalutin influences and references on first (or second) listen. For all its cosmic pessimism and gothic eschatology, FANGS is a thoroughly fun, and funny, record, as danceable as it is deep. Born of and in many parts built for the club, certain tracks would not sound out of place on Brat. Like a Smiths song which sounds happy and carefree until your brain tunes in to the misery of the lyrics, it can be listened to - and enjoyed - on two levels. One can get lost in the throb of bass and ludic synths, or tune into the horror of the lyrics which overlay them. Sometimes these are unignorable, jump-scaring out at you unexpectedly like ‘Gross-up Close-Ups’ which arrest you in your ecstasy and provoke vertiginous comedowns. Spychalski explains that this effect is entirely intentional: “the lyrics are meant to call into question the experience provoked by the music; to seriously subject ‘the club’ to moral inquisition: to extend that moment where the strobe light exposes everything just long enough to reveal the empty void at the heart of it all and trigger panic.”

As a means of exposing this void, the album’s narrative voice often directly embodies the worst excesses of ‘life as club’, and it is here that the theme of Vampirism really takes form. In FANGS, the Vampire has replaced the crypt with the club, and the club is everywhere. “The club has expanded beyond its own walls in an explosion of being, of Dasein in dizzying red shift. The sensory logic of the club - of limitless desires; of lurid hedonism; of endless consumption - bleeds into all of life, or rather into all of undeadness. The vampire inhabits its psychosphere - the cultural unconscious of bass, strobe, and transaction. No sooner is a desire satiated than another takes its place, and the cycle of pain starts again.” In a society based on consumption and desire- satisfaction, we are locked into this Samsaric cycle for eternity like so many vampires.

In this sense, FANGS is a kind of Trojan horse in an era of decadence and degeneracy. As Spychalski writes in the album’s manifesto: “The acid and then ecstasy dreams of the First (1967) and Second (1989) Summers of Love held the promise of a cure to undeadness, in the form of dissolving the pain and isolation of the individual in the fantasy of the collective, and a return to primordial oneness. The shift from Rave to current dancefloor and club culture, is the shift from Solidarity to Self-obsession; from Community to Clout; from the Collective to the Individual; from Egalitarianism to Hierarchy; from Experiencing the Moment to Broadcasting The Moment™, from Ego Death to Celebrity Worship, and from Ecstasy to Cocaine as pharma franca.”

In embodying the hypertrophied excesses of the culture that gave birth to it, FANGS attempts to offer up a reflection to a culture that - like a Vampire - has lost its own. The result is something not only thoroughly modern, original and inventive - but that feels genuinely dangerous and potent. Blake wrote of Milton: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” As in the case of Milton’s Devil (orindeed Stoker’s Dracula) Fangs delights in this ambiguity: simultaneously indicting decadence, decay and moral rot, while luxuriating in its intoxication by it. Cacophonous sub-bass becomes a chthonic call of the void; seraphic rave synths become the screech of valkyries; four-to-the-floor becomes a deathly funeral march. Vampire apocalypse.