★★★★★

Name a band that is, almost by definition, hard to pinpoint, and you’ll probably come up with London’s HMLTD. Stubbornly resisting any conventional classification and pointedly fighting back against the conventions of an increasingly standardised pop scene, they have already proved capable, to name one, of producing a concept album about a giant worm. 

One might be tempted, by title alone, to assume that their third long-player, ‘FANGS’, out this October, is an equally idiosyncratic endeavour. It is, after all, nominally an album about vampires. The darker visuals accompanying it suggest a rather specific vibe that sits somewhere between classic Bauhaus and Rammstein-style industrial rock. The assumption would be understandable, and yet it is incorrect, because HMLTD have a refreshing habit of never doing things straightforwardly. 

‘FANGS’ is not a concept album at all, but rather a collection of highly curated yet disparate pieces, drawing from a broad range of different influences and inspirations, brought together by a deep, intense, occasionally angry, frequently dark and humorous sound.

Musically, the building blocks of ‘FANGS’ range from the almost obvious to the completely unexpected. The band have brought up the concept of ‘Übergoth’ as a codifier for the record: kind of like hyperpop, but for goth rock. So it is hardly a surprise that goth rock itself, especially in its earliest, most classic, and most visually striking incarnations (for visuals are also an important part of the language of this band) surfaces repeatedly within the record. ‘Close To You’, opened by a sound of tolling bells and a haunting bass line, is almost archetypically classic goth. Album closer ‘Sorry For Laughing’, featuring cult French outfit Corpus Delicti, is something Peter Murphy might have been proud of in the times that he was himself prowling the streets looking like a vampire. ‘Dancing On Your Grave’ could be covered by The Horrors with only minimal adjustment. Some of the harder-hitting songs take this goth bedrock and then build industrial and even metal-adjacent elements on top of it. ‘I Used To Ride In Limousines’, perhaps the most visceral piece of music in the record and one of the most striking, uses the blunt sounds of industrial rock to roar out its feelings; but it also has echoes of Led Zeppelin’s occult-adjacent ‘Black Dog’. ‘Grab The Crucifix’ plays with growl-style lyrics to great effect to evoke an atmosphere that feels genuinely sinister, but also oddly playful.

This is HMLTD, though, and so the rabbit hole goes much deeper than making a goth album. An equally important fil rouge running through the whole album is that of EDM and, possibly even more so, EBM. From the very first bars of opener ‘What The Hell’ it becomes immediately clear that this is going to be an eminently danceable album, and this hyper trance-like feeling then translates to some of the most interesting bits of composition further down, including singles ‘Blitzkrieg’ and ‘Umami’, both of which stand on explicit nods to club culture, perhaps more specifically club kid culture, while leaning into an operatic structure, treating the EDM drops and bridges like symphonic movements. Yet, there are more surprising influences. ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’, sitting almost squarely at midpoint, is nearly a straightforward piece of Brechtian cabaret music that makes you wonder what Henry Spychalski would sound like singing ‘Alabama Song’. It is not just a divertissement, either: it serves a specific purpose within the whole album, as though a key through which the record is to be read, down to the explicit Dracula references.

Then, there are features that are just pure HMLTD. Left-field experimentation is one of them, and it gives us some of the most memorable bits of music in this album. ‘One Thousand White Horses’ couples a vocal line that is standard pop with instrumentals that are not pop at all, operating on something very close to a pentatonic scale. Both ‘Umami’ and ‘Blitzkrieg’ loop explicitly back to the band’s beginnings, the latter similar in structure to their very first single ‘Stained’, the former incorporating transitions that sound very much like the ones in fan favourite ‘Proxy Love’. Rather than just going back to what they used to be doing, though, there is a feeling that HMLTD have perfected: for a record that feels so deliberately dirty, in terms of sharp production, this is remarkably crisp and clean. Some of their earliest stuff was, indeed, just on the wrong side of overproduced, while here enough confidence shines through that the production interventions feel just right. The final impression is that no element is left to chance.

It should not work, of course. It is too much all at once, and the many moving parts should not make sense together. But this is HMLTD, and being too much all at once is pretty much their calling card, and it makes almost too much sense that this confrontational, high-brow, slightly demented vampire record is one of the most interesting albums of the year so far.

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