Horrors - Stories of Ghosts and Mirrors

The story of the Horrors begins in the early 2000s, with the meeting of Faris Badwan (the band's future singer), bassist Tom Furse (brother of Vaccines guitarist Freddie Cowan) and keyboardist Rhys Webb. The three found common ground in their love of garage-rock and post-punk, and when in 2005 they crossed instruments with guitarist Joshua Hayward and drummer Joe Spurgeon, the die was pretty much cast, at least as far as the line-up was concerned.

The newborn band's first shows took place at a venue owned by Webb, the Junkclub, opened in 2002 in Southend-on-Sea together with DJ Oliver Abbott, which quickly became one of the driving hubs of London's new music scene. Early on, the set included covers of Sonic's "The Witch" and Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack The Ripper", but the band soon put together a batch of original songs that got people talking.

It was actually "Jack The Ripper" that was chosen as the b-side of the incendiary "Sheena Is A Parasite" (the nod to Ramones' "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" is obvious), the Horrors' first official single, released on April 10, 2006. Three months later came a second single, "Death At The Chapel", backed with "Crawdaddy Simone", which was soon followed by a cover feature on New Musical Express and The Horrors Ep, initially released in the American market, then in the UK (on October 24, 2006), and later in Japan and Australia (with an alternate cover).

The Horrors Ep gathered the material from the first two singles, plus the previously unreleased "Excellent Choice" and the video for "Sheena Is A Parasite", directed by Chris Cunningham and featuring Oscar winner Samantha Morton. The musical coordinates were immediately clear: a garage-rock sound winking on one side at punk and on the other at certain sixties-derived sounds. A genuine "garage" inspiration, weaned on "Nuggets" and whole afternoons spent hunting for obscure vintage vinyl in tiny record shops. Seen from this angle, the early Horrors came across as a meticulous Hollywood remake of the Fuzztones (a revival of the revival, essentially), topped off by a garish, if not outright demented, gothic-inspired look, deliberately exaggerated and clownish (and, for many, pretty hard to take seriously). A scruffy gang of mischievous troublemakers devoted to an honest, vaguely cacophonous form of garage psychobilly, stuffed with references ranging from proto-punk to the Cramps, via Suicide, Pussy Galore and Gun Club.

The Horrors quickly became one of the most acclaimed next big things on the British circuit, and all expectations were confirmed by their debut album Strange House, released by Loog on March 5, 2007, containing four tracks from the previous Ep (only "Crawdaddy Simone" was left out) plus eight new compositions. Telling was the subtitle chosen for the record, coined by two fans at Badwan's explicit request, made through the band's official forum: "Psychotic Sounds For Freaks And Weirdos".

Enjoyable and musically solid, the Horrors' debut showcased a wide-ranging taste for reference-dropping and a decent compositional imagination able to reinvent itself with every song, marked by an originality and breadth of influences fairly unusual on the contemporary indie-rock landscape. Across the twelve tracks that make it up, the stinging weeds of Jesus And Mary Chain sprouted again in the suffocating undergrowth of the indie underground, and the frayed, neurotic howl of Birthday Party and Gun Club rang out once more after years of impenetrable dormancy.

Despite some reservations on formal grounds, it wasn't hard to recognize the quality of the songs with which the Horrors chose to furnish their Strange House, a refuge for every kind of musical oddity, starting with the Screaming Lord Sutch track, "Jack The Ripper" (yes, him again, the one that had featured on the first single), which limps along on a voice all too reminiscent of the never-praised-enough Peter Murphy, before howling into a chorus torn apart by guitars as shrill as a pitch-black flock of starving crows. The dense web of vintage organs and synthesizers running through the track's structure forms the load-bearing frame of almost the entire album's sound. With the following "Count In Five", it's immediately clear that the step from the Klaxons to the Horrors isn't nearly as long as it might seem — just listen to the splashes of multicolored blood spat up by the keyboards over the dizzying, intoxicating chasm of bass and drums. Further proof comes with "Drown Japan", laid over a looped synth line, drilled through by piercing guitars and sinisterly horror-movie keyboard touches.

With "Gloves", the psychedelic garage-rock vocation returns to grind out twisted riffs, as if Bauhaus were being devoured by the most scorching Cramps. "Excellent Choice" is more spoken-word than sung, adorned with sixties keyboard flourishes (to the delight of any incurable collector of vintage gear); the spasms of the convulsive "Little Victories" and its disjointed writhing in a murky, bubbling sludge deliver intense pleasure; "She Is The New Thing" is a blazing glam shooting star spat out of the Stooges' "Raw Power" nebula; the already-familiar "Sheena Is A Parasite" is a two-minute gob of phlegm that slips a stick of dynamite packed with distortion into the Ramones brothers' jeans.

Still, tucked away within Strange House are also a few less successful moments: "Thunderclaps" aims to resemble a witches' sabbath or a Dionysian ritual, but this time it veers off into a sort of ragged polka; "Gil Sleeping" is a fairly pointless, self-indulgent visionary instrumental interlude, used mostly to pad out the record's running time; the closing "A Train Roars" tries to unleash the hordes of evil, but after a solid build-up riding a mighty guitar scrape, the promised apocalypse never arrives.

Having signed to XL and buoyed by the strong response to their work, Badwan and his bandmates decided to raise their ambitions even further. Under the guidance of sound architect Portishead's Geoff Barrow, on April 21, 2009 they released Primary Colours, the cornerstone album of their career. What just two years earlier had been a horror-punk outfit as meticulous as it was one-dimensional became a sophisticated, multifaceted art-rock band, capable of handling the complexity of contradiction and arriving at wholly new syntheses.

Indeed, right from the opening track "Mirror's Image", the intention to swallow up swathes of shoegaze guitar within martial post-punk rhythmic patterns and gloomy gothic-rock atmospheres is clear. It's a high-risk operation, given how historically at odds the two aesthetics are: dreamy and hazy on the shoegaze side, macabre and razor-sharp on the gothic-tinged post-punk side; they meet in an unthinkable marriage in the guitars of Joshua Hayward, a true scientist of pedalboards he builds himself, and in the deep, baritone voice of Faris Badwan. The former ranges effortlessly from reversed, arpeggiated electric-guitar textures to saturated glide-guitar chords, a style made famous between the Eighties and Nineties by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, while the latter decisively shifts from the screamed vocals of the first record to a more declamatory delivery, skillfully using vocal breaks to heighten the dramatic effect. Far from secondary is the contribution of the other three musicians, who are in fact essential to the overall musical success: the rhythm section, made up of drummer Joseph Spurgeon and bassist Rhys Webb, is metronomic, with the former hammering out patterns between kick, snare and hi-hat, and the latter producing relentless eighth-note bass roots, while Tom Furse's keyboards — he gives up bass duties from this album on, leaving them to Rhys Webb — first paint a long, peaceful, almost new-age ambient introduction, before repeatedly surfacing with an obsessive synth theme.

"Three Decades" pushes the glide guitar even further and betrays the singer's clear devotion to Peter Murphy, while "Who Can Say", the album's second single, is a nightmarish lullaby: the vocal line and keyboard theme are catchy and in a major key, but the former is run through heavy distortion and the latter uses a synth sound with slightly off-kilter harmonies, to deeply sinister effect. Bass and guitar violate any hint of delicacy with distortion and feedback. The chord progression and melody nonetheless betray a clear vocal/girl-group inspiration, made explicit by the lyric's direct quote of "She Cried" by Jay and the Americans, also known for a cover by the Shangri-Las (retitled for the occasion "He Cried"):

And when I told her I didn’t love her anymore, she cried

And when I told her her kisses were not like before, she cried

And when I told her another girl had caught me eyes, she cried

And then I kissed her with a kiss that could only mean goodbye

For the curious, it's rather hilarious to compare the old song with its postmodern, possessed counterpart.

"New Ice Age" has a long intro in which the electric guitar stubbornly plays a riff built on an interval of three tones (the kind of distance between notes that, played together, forms the so-called 'devil's chord'), with the other instruments building toward an exasperated, malevolent crescendo. "Scarlet Fields" is the proving ground for the rhythm section, which dynamically steers the song and leaves open space for abstract brushstrokes of guitar and synth, while the vocal line is a textbook example of Badwan's new, more melodic approach. "I Only Think of You" is a toxic litany in the vein of the Velvet Underground, with Spurgeon fittingly playing an extremely simple, tribal rhythmic pattern, almost recalling Moe Tucker's style. "I Can't Control Myself" is the remaining tie to the psychobilly/garage sound that first got them noticed, played here favoring sonic sophistication over aggression, while the title track shows off neo-psychedelic organs and noise guitars over an almost Motown drum groove.

The album closes with "Sea Within a Sea", which, despite running eight minutes long, was the first single used to introduce the record. An extreme choice, no doubt, as is typical for the band, but essentially unavoidable, since this mini-suite of sorts is probably the single most representative track in their entire discography. The opening makes things clear right away: Spurgeon's motorik beat and Rhys Webb's eighth-note root notes are so precise and relentless that they come across as a constant presence for almost the entire track. In the hefty minute-plus of introduction, the atmosphere is about as close as you can get to a smooth version of Hawkwind's epic space-rock rides; the mood is made even more suspended by a phrase of three identical notes looped on the electric guitar. Badwan then enters, declaiming a lyric with a messianic tone:

Marching towards the sea

Their dreams remain in the shadows

Their dreams remain firmly rooted in the shallows

See the sky scraping

Vedi la mia destinazione, vedi la mia destinazione qui stanotte.

The voice carries a major-key melody, while harmonically the whole verse revolves around the chords of F# and G with a diminished fifth, an essential harmonic sequence that nonetheless conveys a strong sense of irresolution and suspension. Once the sung section ends, a brief burst of cosmic, dissonant sounds opens up, played both on keyboard pads and electric guitar, the latter loaded with so many effects of various kinds that it becomes almost unrecognizable. After a short pause given over to kick drum and bass, with the two musicians having by now turned into human metronomes, an unexpected sequencer with a Chicago house sound makes an appearance, a close relative of the one that opens the legendary "Your Love" by Frankie Knuckles (which, not coincidentally, the Horrors would cover in 2014). The vocal melody then returns, still in the same scale, but the surrounding atmosphere has changed: the band now plays a chord progression in F# major, with no tension or diminished chords, giving off a solemn feeling. The long ending loops repeatedly, with the rhythm section gradually fading away, leaving room for a coda given over entirely to Tom Furse and his flair for timbral exploration.

After such a complex and all-consuming album, expectations around the five Englishmen grew sky-high, and the band found itself at a delicate turning point in a dazzling career that had begun just five years earlier. Their answer was to take the conversation somewhere else entirely, through a dense, labyrinthine record, imagined and built cog by cog in their newly-owned studio, in complete creative self-sufficiency. Skying, as the chosen title went, hit record shops in July 2011, trumpeted ahead of time by the extraordinary single "Still Life", a track more U2 than U2 themselves have been in years.

Skying leaves behind the distortion and the thick, layered grain of noise of the previous record, searching elsewhere for new ideas and solutions. The band had always made disguise into a refined, daring art form: every one of their creations is in fact a re-creation, and every one of their sounds a magnificent re-echo of other sounds floating like ghosts in our unconscious memory. Therein lies the band's potent relevance, and from this point of view they stayed perfectly true to the poetics that had inspired their work from the very start, this time relocating their hunting grounds to an imagined new wave that couldn't be more classic or orthodox in intent. The romantic, declamatory imagery of Simple Minds (just listen to the gorgeous "I Can See Through You", almost a programmatic tribute) as well as of Psychedelic Furs, Chameleons, Danse Society, Theatre Of Hate or Sad Lovers And Giants, to give a sense of where they were coming from.

Of their old roots, what survives are certain psychedelic codas or ouvertures that lean toward sweeping instrumental vistas, which showcase the taste and refined executional elegance of the five musicians (among the best moments are the atmospheric "Endless Blue", the beautiful "Moving Further Away", with its liquid, fading synth brushstrokes, or "Oceans Burning", bordering on dream-pop) but, on the whole, Skying shines with a beauty of its own, neither superior nor inferior to what the band had already shown in the past. Some might say there's less introspection and more form, less pain and more surface, but songs like "Dive In", "Monica Gems" or "Wild Eyed" speak for themselves: the group has by now achieved an identity made up of endless, dizzying resemblances, delivering to the listener's ears a ripe, bittersweet fruit, born from multiple graftings of combined flavours and essences.

Over time, the members of Horrors have launched numerous side projects, among which at least the duo Cat's Eyes deserves a mention, formed by the pair Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira, a multi-instrumentalist and composer with a distinctive soprano voice. Cat's Eyes, released in early 2011, received positive reviews from critics and established itself as a thoroughly successful work, steeped in a visionary, vintage auteur pop.

Worth noting is the digital release in December 2012 of Higher, a collection of remixes of the tracks from Skying. A few months later, in March 2013, the physical edition came out, a limited-run box set containing four twelve-inch vinyls, two CDs and a DVD.

The frenetic pre-release campaign for Luminous, the fourth studio album by Horrors, released on 5 May 2014, was marked by countless interviews full of colourful statements about creative vigour and a desire to shuffle the deck: plenty of talk and precious little music, with practically only one track played live on various occasions. Then the first single "I See You" hit the radio, and — much to the dismay of anyone predicting a decline — from the very first listens it settled in among the band's classics: seven minutes of futuristic disco, electro and space contaminations, underpinning one of their most ethereal, adolescent lyrics. The winning card of Luminous lies in how sparkling and airy it is, without ever running the risk of inconsistency, instead sounding vital in every single drop.

Faris Badwan, once the sorcerer of the post-Strokes generation, has by now become an angel capable of refined, dreamlike interpretations: top marks on this front surely go to "Change Your Mind", a ballad of such staggering beauty that it leaves you stunned, unfolding languidly amid layered psychedelic sounds. It's impossible to catch every nuance on a casual listen, but it's clear that the band's new direction falls within a space-flavoured neo-psychedelia, one that can be danceable (some have mentioned Cut Copy, and fair enough) but also caressing, depending on the listening context. It's music that offers no fixed reference points, paradoxically producing the opposite effect: around every corner you seem to hear echoes of earlier bands. The truth is that Horrors now sound only like themselves, and their eclecticism, almost progressive in nature, has become their defining trait.

Compared to previous records, Rhys Webb's bass emerges much more here, weaving sinuous, hypnotic lines that are also eminently danceable (just listen to the twisting groove of "In And Out Of Sight" to believe it). The intersection between synths and guitars is pushed to the limit, to the point where it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. On "First Day Of Spring" the guitars clearly open the track, but then they seem almost to get sucked into a whirlpool of flanger and other effects, losing their own characteristic timbre (everything comes back together in the splendid coda, where the guitar reclaims its place, almost forcefully). No less striking in this regard is the central pairing of "Jealous Sun"/"Falling Star" (surprisingly Japanese in mood), where shoegaze echoes return amid gothic touches softened by exotic fascinations and melodies that highlight Badwan's new compositional sensibility.

Both the title and the cover illustrate the feeling of being in the presence of an album played out in shades of colour, like those seen on the unidentifiable object on the sleeve, and in luminosity understood as the means to unveil new worlds and filigree patterns. Sounds that can feel vaguely third-world, as in the gorgeous intro of "Chasing Shadows" (the perfect counterpart to "Changing The Rain", the opening track of "Skying") or exquisitely dance-oriented, as on the single "So Now You Know". Even the tracks that at first seem to say less, like "Mine And Yours" or the drowsy, atmospheric "Sleepwalk", end up carving out a space entirely their own, closing the record with a warm, tender embrace.

At this point in their career, Horrors rightfully deserve a place among the greats of British music, and not just of recent years. It's genuinely hard to find another run of four opening albums that all hit the mark, each with its own distinct identity. Every new record doesn't turn its back on what came before, but at the same time adds precious new pieces, clear innovations. More than any other band working today, Horrors embody, in the most tangible way, the most radical gesture of our musical present: in their hands, "rock history" becomes a fluid, malleable concept, free from hierarchy, which their imagination draws on to conjure ever-new, unpredictable scenarios of meaning and association of ideas. Resembling everyone and no one, Horrors have ended up forging an unmistakable sound, equal to the most stimulating challenges of our time.

Having already proven their immense versatility by pulling a cover of "Your Love" by the sorely missed and unmatched Frankie Knuckles out of the hat, Horrors return to the fray with their fifth album, simply titled V, three years on from the splendours of the beautiful Luminous. The record was recorded in London by the renowned producer Paul Epworth (FKA Twigs, Adele, London Grammar, Coldplay, U2, Paul McCartney and many others), and the band, now led ever more firmly by the good Faris Badwan, decided on this occasion to once again turn their sonic framework upside down, firing off songs one after another that now lean toward a more electronic, in some ways "danceable" vocation, now instead take on a hard, pure cyberpunk hue, with abrasive guitars capable of carving an indelible and, in some ways, undefinable gash.

Just the opening moments of "Hologram", with its contorted, warped, disturbed gait, are enough to savour the new recipe cooked up by the Essex band. It's almost like hearing an intriguing, slowed-down crumpling of "Army Of Me" by the Icelandic elf. But we're only at the beginning. The following "Press Enter To Exit" keeps untangling the knots of a new voltaic bond, advancing at a slow pace before opening up in the central chorus with the band's usual load of light and shade, synths and guitars. A further, genuine piece of magic comes courtesy of "Ghost", with its five minutes of pure electro-rock obsession. Razor-sharp guitars, swirling synthetic carpets of sound and a crescendo as commanding as it is calamitous blend together perfectly. V has no notable dips and is simply yet another bullseye from a band that still hasn't run out of momentum, or of its reservoir of ideas and engaging melodies.

In March 2021, three tracks were released, enough to shake up old and new fans alike, contained in the EP Lout. Not everyone will agree with the band's choices, but to pass the time while waiting for the next album, Horrors put together just over eleven minutes that leave no doubt: "Lout", "Org" and "Whiplash", the titles of the three tracks on the EP, are unmistakably industrial, an aggressive, raw, dark sound, nasty and heavy, directly recalling a 90s-style hybrid born of Trent Reznor and Killing Joke. Faris Badwan and co. have shed their skin more than once over the course of their career, and spotting renewed nastiness in their songwriting is certainly a sign of vitality.

It's the result of an experiment, a little game indulged in from home during the Covid-19 lockdown, in the knowledge that, at that point, after the fine return of "V", the band no longer had anything left to prove, and above all faced no pressure from the record industry to produce a hit. And so the challenge took shape: managing to create something vigorously alive even remotely, stripped of the energy that's usually unleashed when everyone plays together in the same room. Nineties nostalgia condensed into two sung tracks plus an instrumental, musically very close to one another, though in the latter — "Org" — clear references to Prodigy and rave culture also emerge.

Lout could be perceived as a work outside their usual territory, and the question remains whether it's a push toward new sonic horizons (for them) or simply a divertissement conceived to fill the time between one album and the next. It comes across as a strong work with real internal coherence, but it will be their next songs that give us a definitive answer.

Rather than calm after the storm, the Horrors' unexpected return to the scene in 2025 feels more like a drizzle that refuses to stop falling from the sky. Disorientation, for sure. Both in the lyrics - mostly claustrophobic, only rarely airy - and in the style, now firmly darkwave in the manner of Depeche Mode: third- or fourth-rate, depending on the moment. But Faris, obviously, is no Dave. Likewise, the arrival in the ranks of keyboardist Millie Kidd and drummer Jordan Cobb adds plenty of smoke and little substance to a recipe that disorients from the very start anyone who had appreciated the danceable - and at this point illusory - potential shown back in the days of the masterpiece that is "Something to Remember Me By".

With Night Life, then, out goes the light and in comes the shadow of their very earliest origins. If the post-punk bass of "The Silence That Remains" is a double backflip toward the Cure, or pick any random band close to the Sound and their ilk, the spectral stride of "Trial by Fire" resets expectations in the best possible way, regardless of any reference point you might draw.

In short, six albums in, the English band has essentially set aside a certain past to hole up in potentially fascinating noir arrangements, which indulge a mood of rupture, in a continuous collapsing between dark synth lines and crooked melodies.

It's a plunge into the void where time slips away, beyond the thoughts of an all-too-predictable farewell, before the electronic pulse of the good old days resurfaces soaked in oil and industrial sludge ("Lotus Eater"). There's also room for a solitary piece played at dawn in perfect isolation, with the keyboards finally craving sunlight, while Faris sings, half-asleep, of a return to life after a night of fitful nightmares ("When The Rhythm Breaks").

On the next tour, plenty of people will be jumping to the notes of "La Runaway", not because it's the best moment of an alienating record, but simply because it's the track where the "new" Horrors cheerfully tell their equally new demons to get lost. At the end of the day, Night Life remains a divisive record, one that submits to the attempt at reinvention with mixed results. Take it or leave it. Or rather: handle it without too many expectations, or immediately put the old Horrors back on the turntable.

Contributions by Giacomo Rivoira ("Primary Colours"), Gioele Sforza ("Luminous"), Giuliano Delli Paoli ("V", "Night Life")

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