Frontman Henry Spychalski connects the dots along the band's trajectory to find that it is indeed a circle. “In a sense, they are twins,” he says, pairing new single ‘Blitzkrieg’ with ‘Stained’, the band’s very first studio offering. “‘Stained’ was our first single, and it is a decade since we released it. It feels like it’s gone full circle and it’s taken us ten years to come home, like Odysseus”. In the process, the band rediscovered itself and fulfilled, prophecy-style, an old promise: “When we released ‘Stained’, our message was: we’ll never go away. By returning with ‘Blitzkrieg’, which is a song very much in the founding ethos of HMLTD, we’re coming good on that promise. We’ll never go away, and HMLTD is forever”.
Much like Odysseus, before they managed their triumphant homecoming, they lost themselves along the way. The darkest hour before the dawn, it seems, came in the interlude following their second studio album, ‘The Worm’. “We started making a third album, and I had been going through quite a traumatic breakup at that point,” Spychalski reminisces. “We ended up making essentially an indie album - guitars, bass, drums, vocals - and that was it. There was none of the kind of experimentalism or avant-garde approach that characterised us. We felt very alienated from the process, and we ended up with an album we hated. So we literally deleted it. We deleted the files, threw the album in the bin, and started again. We were trying to figure out: if we are starting again, what are we doing?”
Goth rock, in the end, provided the answer. “It’s always been one of our primary influences on everything we’ve done. We started listening to a lot of goth music that we had not listened to in a long time, bands like Bauhaus, or a lot of the 80s and EBM music. So we’ve always really been a goth band. We’re just embracing it more fully on this record, without disguising it as something else. We’re trying to update it from the moment we live in, drawing influences from hyperpop, for instance, trying to look at goth through that looking glass”. They have coined a new term for what this is, the rather Nietzschean ‘über-goth’. “Über-goth is to goth what hyperpop is to pop,” Spychalski laughs.
Other influences, musical and otherwise, come from further afield. Classical music and opera have been a looming presence over the band’s work from the beginning. “We’re very much inspired by Wagner, who talked about the Gesamtkunstwerk,” Spychalski explains, referencing the concept of the ‘total work of art’, combining all aspects of art into an all-immersive form. “We’re trying to create artworks which don’t abide by any particular genre and ideally make use of every medium available to create this full, totalising experience. That’s something we’ve never achieved yet. But it’s an ambition that definitely guides us at all times”.
Through the years, that ambition has guided the band into immersive, concept-heavy live shows and music videos that feel like a different piece of the tracks they go hand in hand with. The red thread connecting it all is a cultivation of a confrontational, unsettling atmosphere. “Viennese Actionism is something I personally have been very inspired by, as well as Situationism,” Spychalski notes. “That idea of creating confrontation. By creating these collisions between real life and art, you’re able to force yourself, or your audience, to take a step back and maybe step outside of your normal way of being”.
In the era of the safe space, it feels very deliberate to go looking for the unsettling. “What’s so horrifying is the way that anything that is subversive or transgressive eventually becomes co-opted and subsumed into the pop hole. I remember working with Jenkin van Zyl, possibly the greatest visual artist we’ve ever worked with. There was an aesthetic that he was doing at the time, with these clothes that were some sort of balloon fetish, that felt genuinely very transgressive and dangerous. And then, within five years, Sam Smith was wearing something similar at the Brit Awards. Capitalism and pop culture have this habit of declawing and taming everything that feels clawed and untameable”.
Between Wagner and Viennese Actionism, it feels like the band is deliberately waging war against the anti-intellectualism that is on the rise in the pop sphere. “It is in such stark contrast to what you had in other eras of music,” Spychalski points out. “Even a band like Spandau Ballet, who literally wrote ‘Gold’, if you look more closely, their name refers to the dance that corpses did on World War Two barbed wire when they came under fire from German tanks. Those were bands who were really interested in history and philosophy. The Cure were writing about Camus. This new strain of anti-intellectualism is brand new, and I find it stultifying and, honestly, really boring”. It’s very much a political stance, too: “What could be more patronising, and more elitist, than to say that working class people can’t engage with that kind of material?”
What’s the HMLTD antidote to all that, then? “Imagination as a radical political act. When you imagine new worlds, you point attention to your own world, and what it is. Which is imagined”.
Chiara Strazzulla
Image: Rose Mihman