The Horrors go from the garage to the autobahn

With new album Luminous, Britain’s Horrors dropped the protopunk and indulged their love of vintage electronica

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      The Horrors have proven nothing if not restless since first surfacing a decade ago in the English resort town of Southend-on-Sea. Back in the quintet’s formative years, in the middle of the last decade, Sonics-vintage garage rock was the primary reference point. A 2007 debut album titled Strange House suggested that, somewhere along the line, the Horrors discovered the deliciously dark goth-badlands brilliance of acts like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Psychedelia-swirled shoegaze had seeped into the mix by the time of the Mercury Prize–nominated Primary Colours (2009), with trip-hop and droning postpunk joining the party for the 2011 follow-up, Skying.

      Considering the Horrors’ reputation as a band constantly in motion, it was no surprise that this year’s Luminous lit out in a new direction. Reviews have praised the record for drawing on electronic music, the ghosts of iconic acts such as Kraftwerk looming large on the songs. Reached at home on his cellphone, bassist Rhys Webb confirms that he and his bandmates did indeed indulge in their love of dance music, which came completely naturally to them as Brits.

      “Electronic music and dance music has been a huge, really important part of British culture since the mid to late ’80s,” Webb opines. “And even before then, you had dance music as represented by soul music in the ’60s through Northern Soul through disco. So dance music has always been really important over here.”

      That’s probably doubly true today, with EDM arguably the biggest musical genre in the world right now. Webb notes, however, that the Horrors were looking beyond modern genre heavyweights like Skrillex and deadmau5.

      “I don’t know much about the whole Skrillex scene,” he admits. “It doesn’t really appeal to me as much as listening to something on Trax records—Phuture or Model 500 is the kind of shit that I like.”

      Fans will definitely hear that on Luminous. The Horrors—who include singer Faris Badwan, keyboardist Tom Cowan, guitarist Joshua Hayward, and drummer Joe Spurgeon—unleash the vintage-synth army for “So Now You Know”, which sounds like the sunny side of heaven in spring. “Falling Star” and “In and Out of Sight” both revolve around deep-house bass lines, while “Chasing” time-travels back to the discos of England during the pills-’n’-thrills glory years. Those looking for a bridge to the band’s past can proceed directly to “Chasing Shadows”, which is as indebted to the psychedelic ’60s as it is to the Madchester ’90s.

      As well-executed as it all is, Webb suggests the Horrors didn’t necessarily make a calculated decision to go in the direction they’ve taken on Luminous.

      “We’ve always listened to all kinds of music,” Webb says. “But the more the band evolved, the more we’ve got into exploring other ideas. Exploring different sounds has become more, I don’t know, more acceptable. Being really into early things and the Radiophonics workshops really impacted us. There’s so much to explore, from Kraftwerk to even Chris & Cosey and Throbbing Gristle. What we like is even if you go back to the late ’70s, you had bands using sequences and drum machines that sound like they could have come out of Detroit in the ’80s and ’90s. And things like Suicide had a real electronic feel later on. We were interested in exploring all those sounds.”

      It’s not an accident that the Horrors have gotten better at branching out over the past few years. The group has slowly built up its own home studio, which, more than anything, has coloured the songwriting.

      “We’re always collecting ideas, but what we do to get the ball rolling is get together, play, and then see what happens,” Webb says. “It’s not really the most conventional way of doing things. There’s no one member of the group who shows up with an idea or a full song. It’s more building something out of a bass line or something on the synth. We mess around until we’ve got something that sounds exciting, which makes it all really organic.”

      The spinoff benefit of that anything-goes approach has been that the Horrors now span a whole host of genres. Consider what Webb and his bandmates got up to earlier this year, in May. At a time when Luminous was just introducing them to discerning dance-music fans, they found themselves playing the Austin Psych Fest, Texas’s annual high-profile celebration of all things grimy, lo-fi, and lysergic. The invitation to the showcase came from Austin’s Black Angels, who not only organize the festival but make sure it’s packed with the kind of acts that prefer the garage to the sun.

      “Psych Fest is the kind of thing that appeals to us, not just because they are hosting loads of really exciting new bands, but because the organizers themselves are big fans of bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, the Seeds, and the Sonics,” Webb says. “That’s kind of where our band started off—that was the sound that brought us together when we were in our late teens, and me in my early 20s. Garage is what we bonded over and is a sound we still love.”

      The Horrors may have planted one foot on the dance floor with Luminous, but they haven’t forgotten where they come from.

      The Horrors play the Rickshaw Theatre on Sunday (October 19).

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