The Horrors
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Beginning as a big-haired, black-clad garage punk outfit and soon morphing into something more experimental, the Horrors featured singer Faris Badwan, bassist Tom Furse, guitarist Joshua Hayward, drummer Joe Spurgeon, and keyboardist Rhys Webb. The Horrors formed in the summer of 2005 and quickly gained notoriety around London for their look, sound, and brief but frantic live shows. Loog soon signed them, and the Horrors released their official debut single, "Sheena Is a Parasite/Jack the Ripper," in spring 2006. That summer the Horrors released their second single, Death at the Chapel. They also reissued "Sheena Is a Parasite" as a limited-edition DVD single. The song's startling video was directed by Chris Cunningham and featured actress Samantha Morton as Sheena. Late that summer, the band signed to Stolen Transmission in the U.S. and released a self-titled EP that fall. They also issued the Count in Fives single in the U.K. around that time.
The Gloves single arrived early in 2007, heralding the release of the Horrors' full-length debut, Strange House, which arrived in the U.K. that March and in the U.S. in May. In 2008, Webb and Furse formed the analog synth project Spider & the Flies, and released the album Something Clockwork This Way Comes. For 2009's Primary Colours, the band worked with Cunningham and Portishead's Geoff Barrow as co-producers, opting for a very different sound that mixed shoegaze, post-punk, and goth; the album was released by XL that spring and earned several critical raves, including NME's Album of the Year. In between albums, Badwan teamed with Canadian opera singer Rachel Zeffira for the hazy pop project Cat's Eyes, which released its self-titled debut in early 2011. The Horrors self-produced their follow-up, 2011's Skying, which featured a lighter yet still atmospheric sound that drew comparisons to My Bloody Valentine and the Psychedelic Furs. In 2012, they released the remix companion album Higher and embarked on an extensive tour. In 2013, they began recording new material with producer Craig Silvey. Early the following year, the single "I See You" reflected the more expansive direction of their fourth album, Luminous, which arrived in May 2014. The Horrors began work on their next full-length with Paul Epworth at London's Church Studios in 2015, and forged a darker, rawer yet still danceable sound that borrowed from '80s post-punk, synth-pop, and '90s dance. The result was V, which arrived in September 2017. Heather Phares
© TiVo
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Alternative & Indie - Released September 22, 2017 | Wolf Tone
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With Luminous, no-one could have accused The Horrors of resting on their laurels. Each album from the Southend group takes the breath away by its self-reinvention - more than can be said for many bands. With this fourth work that came out in 2014, the Brits cooked up a record which managed to be homogeneous in spite of all the styles it lifts: from psychedelia, new wave, shoegaze, goth, krautrock and even electro. Three years later, V preserves this eclecticism, driving it onward into more poppy terrain. Because, twelve years after their birth, The Horrors are hungry! Now done with the underground's chiaroscuro, Faris Badwan and his bandmates want to taste stadium-level fame and see the top of the charts. But where the fifth album succeeds is in its ability to play the commercial card, all the while maintaining its identity. So The Horrors are not selling their soul to the devil, but rather in refining its choruses and melodies, rounding off certain angular guitars and putting the accent on their music's groovy potential, with the result of a record that at times evokes Bowie. People who do labels will talk about a mature album. Everyone else will just talk about a perfectly-mastered rock record. © MD/Qobuz
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Alternative & Indie - Released May 5, 2014 | XL Recordings
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Alternative & Indie - Released August 9, 2011 | XL Recordings
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Alternative & Indie - Released December 4, 2012 | XL Recordings
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Alternative & Indie - Released April 21, 2009 | XL Recordings
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Alternative & Indie - Released September 22, 2017 | Wolf Tone
After self-producing 2014's Luminous, the Horrors worked with Paul Epworth, a producer renowned for his big sound, on their follow-up V. While the band's fifth album sounds expectedly stadium-sized, bringing another pair of ears into the fold seems to have pushed the Horrors to make the biggest changes to their music since Primary Colours. This time, along with synth pop and shoegaze, they make other sounds from the '80s and early '90s -- baggy, rave, industrial -- their playthings, most strikingly on the opener "Hologram," which sounds like a trippier take on Tubeway Army and sets the tone for V's edgier sounds and outlook. The band reflects on altered states of reality, as well as things that aren't quite real, on songs such as "Press Enter to Exit," where swirling beats and guitars match the band's musings on the looping nature of time, and the industrial-tinged "Machine," one of their noisiest and nastiest songs since Strange House. While duality and imitation are unsurprising lyrical territory for a band whose sound has changed so much over the years, each incarnation of the Horrors has felt genuine. V is no exception: As the album spans "World Below"'s fusion of shoegaze and industrial, "Something to Remember Me By"'s bittersweet widescreen synth pop, the trip-hop-tinged "Ghost," and the Suede-like balladry of "It's a Good Life," the variety of sounds the band explores feels particularly engaging, especially when compared to the way Skying and Luminous presented their music as an ethereal blur. Not everything on V works -- "Weighed Down" and "Gathering" lack the focus of the album's highlights -- but the songs that do are some of the Horrors' most exciting yet.
© Heather Phares /TiVo
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Alternative & Indie - Released May 2, 2000 | In The Red
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Alternative & Indie - Released March 5, 2007 | Island Def Jam
On their singles and EPs, the Horrors proved they'd done their post-punk and freakbeat homework. With their debut album, Strange House, they push their sound forward, distill it to its rawest essence, and give it a few funhouse mirror twists and turns for good measure. Almost half of the songs on the album already appeared on previous Horrors releases, but the ever-so-slightly cleaner production here gives more definition to their black-on-black sound. The band kicks off Strange House by revisiting their cover of Screaming Lord Sutch's "Jack the Ripper," which begins at a zombie-slow pace, then suddenly speeds up halfway through, transforming into a hurtling roller coaster of a song that makes a great introduction to Strange House's mix of campy humor, energy, and menace. With its dive-bombing noise barely held together by Faris Badwan's shouting and the faintest hint of a melody, "Sheena Is a Parasite" is still the Horrors' best and most radical song, although several other tracks here rival its black-hearted thrills. Once again, Spider Webb's vicious keyboards are the band's not-so-secret weapon, especially on the fantastic, strutting "She Is the New Thing," which blurs the line between girls and trends, flings and boredom, with macabre flair. On Strange House's wildest tracks, the Horrors channel their idol Joe Meek's love of wild sounds. "Thunderclaps" grafts galloping rhythms, twangy guitars, and chanted backing vocals together, Frankenstein-style, while "Little Victories" brandishes noisy onslaughts and turns them off just as quickly. The very end of the album gets even weirder and more deconstructed: "Gil Sleeping"'s woozy organs and jazzy drumming and "A Train Roars"' ominous, loping rhythms show that the Horrors are committed to pushing the boundaries of their sound, even if these experiments aren't quite as immediate as their more song-based work. The Horrors are unabashedly arty and stylish, but they're a great example of the kind of art-school band that lurks in the shadows of British rock (and of which there have been too few in the 2000s). If you like what the Horrors do, then Strange House is an album that can never be loud enough.
© Heather Phares /TiVo
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Alternative & Indie - Released March 30, 2018 | Wolf Tone
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Alternative & Indie - Released February 23, 2021 | Caroline International (License Internal)
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Alternative & Indie - Released May 6, 2014 | XL Recordings
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Alternative & Indie - Released August 9, 2017 | Wolf Tone
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Alternative & Indie - To be released March 12, 2021 | Caroline International (License Internal)
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Electronic - Released August 16, 2019 | Caroline International (P&D)
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Alternative & Indie - Released August 2, 2019 | Wolf Tone
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Alternative & Indie - To be released March 12, 2021 | Caroline International (License Internal)
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Alternative & Indie - Released August 9, 2019 | Wolf Tone
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Alternative & Indie - Released February 23, 2021 | Caroline International (License Internal)
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Alternative & Indie - Released August 9, 2017 | Wolf Tone
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Alternative & Indie - Released April 15, 2003 | In The Red
