London collective HMLTD (Henry Spychalski, Duc Peterman, Andrei Martynchyk, Theo Spark) today announce their new album FANGS, which will be released via Lucky Number on October 23rd. They also today share new single “I Used To Ride In Limousines” which is accompanied by a stunning new video, once again directed by Henry Spychalski. Additionally, the band also today reveal details of a London headline show at Village Underground on March 4th 2027 (full dates below).
Of new single “I Used To Ride In Limousines”, HMLTD say –
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. This is a song about failure and success. It’s about making peace with failure, finding liberation in the sovereign, non-productive waste of failure, and about rejecting all instrumentalist notions of ‘success’ that subjugate life and the human experience itself to ‘success’ as an end goal. It’s about rejecting the ego, and it’s about rediscovering and redefining a sense of self-worth that is entirely one’s own“
On their third album, FANGS, HMLTD have created an entirely new genre: Götherdammerüng (or ÜberGöth). Predictably unpredictable, it could not be further away from their last outing, 2023 rock opera The Worm. The sixteen-piece orchestra has been traded in for Ableton, the timpani and violins replaced with side-chained four-to-the-floor and rave synths, and the gospel choir swapped for guttural gothic howling and black metal screams. The result is both unique and terrifying: a total reinvention and rehabilitation of the goth genre, through the looking glass of modern electronic and doomscroll-era dance music.
This new beginning was accompanied by a change in personnel, with Theo Spark and Andrei Martynchyk joining the fray alongside original members Henry Spychalski and Duc Peterman. Decamping to a ruined château in the Loire Valley, the quartet became obsessed with vampire lore, and the EBM and goth sound that inspired their early work: Fad Gadget, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Bauhaus. FANGS also points to more contemporary influences like Crystal Castles, German hardcore, 2000s blog-house a la Justice, and 2020s sleazepop.
The world crafted in FANGS is full of cosmic pessimism, glowing horror, imperceptible evil and digital dismemberment, ancient curses and ruined castles, Vampires. But it is also a thoroughly fun, and funny, record, as danceable as it is deep. Born of the club, some tracks would not sound out of place on Brat. Like a Smiths song which sounds happy and carefree until your brain tunes in to the misery of the lyrics, it can be listened to – and enjoyed – on two levels. One can get lost in the throb of bass and ludic synths, or tune into the horror of the lyrics which overlay them.
FANGS attempts to offer up a reflection to a culture that – like a Vampire – has lost its own. The result is something not only thoroughly modern, original and inventive – but that feels genuinely dangerous and potent. FANGS delights in this ambiguity: simultaneously indicting decadence, decay and moral rot, while luxuriating in its intoxication by it. Cacophonous sub-bass becomes a chthonic call of the void; seraphic rave synths become the screech of valkyries; four-to-the-floor becomes a deathly funeral march. Vampire apocalypse.
1. What The Hell
2. I Used To Ride In Limousines
3. Umami
4. Dancing On Your Grave
5. A Thousand White Horses
6. Close To You
7. Chateau Vamp Freestyle
8. Grab The Crucifix
9. Shudder
10. Blitzkrieg
11. Sorry For Laughing (ft. Corpus Delicti)
Album Pre-Order – https://found.ee/HMLTDFANGS