The Dark Stuff: Night Life by The Horrors
The Horrors have never shied away from a certain darkness, a distinctly ethereal mood that has lent itself to both stunning musical landscapes and yet a conspicuous amount of distance from their audience. This time, they allow themselves to be enveloped by it - who can blame them?
From debut Strange House’s juvenile screech, to V’s throbbing psychedelia, via the lush textures of Primary Colours and Skying, the results being one of British music’s finest artistic reinventions, they have constantly shifted and mutated in a way that has stayed loyal to their love of layers, distortion and goth-tinted noise, adding space, clarity or melodrama wherever they have felt like it. This year’s release, Night Life, is still an evolution of sorts, but one that sharpens all the edges and pounds away with an industrial economy, staring straight into the sickly vacuum of 2025, rather than rejoicing at the theatre of it all.
Whilst there are more appropriate forums, and it’s an issue worthy of far more focus than a mere album review, it would be remiss to ignore founder and chief lyricist Faris Badwan’s Palestinian heritage here, and how the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza must have contributed to the mood; an already gloomy disposition faced by deeply personal and haunting events is the recipe for this even bleaker offering than usual. It’s of course hard to say whether the lyrics are a direct confrontation of this, but they certainly seem to hint at it with some war-torn imagery, and indeed Badwan’s words feel more focused and sharper than at any point in their latter-day career.
Add to that the pervading sense of unease, worry and general ‘Horror’ around the globe, and you get to Night Life’s cloaked, dusky endgame. There is no release here, none of the glorious shafts of light that would previously burst through… where could they have possibly have found them? Night Life hums with a real sorrow, feels at home with solitude, and creates the sense of wading through the current fog of our existence, armed only with a phone torch to guide us.
Ariel deliberately drags us swiftly into the bleak underworld of the album. Building steadily, an icy, creeping ambience, with robotic off-kilter vocals adding to the portent, a vivid nightmare brought to life: “All dreams hang unseen in the air, and every hollow cross we carry through our lives, Drags on our backs beneath the sun”. A party album this ain’t, and when Silent Sister implores the singer “let it wash all over me”, whatever ‘it’ is doesn’t sound like fun.
The Silence That Remains seems the most relevant cut on the album, examining the void that is left when waiting. We’re “walking the length of the city, like a child, waiting for the call", lost amongst the rubble of atrocities. It can be no coincidence that this is paired with the pounding Trial By Fire, which booms nihilistically that “no one gets out alive” over an almost military stomp.
Lotus Eater is some of the starkest work The Horrors have ever produced and serves as the backbone of the album; it’s a sordid piece of work, scuzzy and dance-driven, except nobody here is dancing. Faris implores that we’ve “spent too much time worrying about yesterday”, but this does not seem like a call to throw your hair back, enjoy the moment; instead, we’ve got to worry about today. Following this is More Than Life, probably the most classically ‘Horrors’ piece of work, a familiar slab of longing, tweaked to fit in with the more mechanical feel of the album, unable or unwilling to break the shackles of doom fully, which is underlined by When The Rhythm Breaks, an impenetrable whisper of sadness.
It is by no means a faultless work, tending to drift into unfocused avenues, and uniform beats and thuds make some songs blend into one, whilst the closer, LA Runaway, feels like a glorious idea slightly shoehorned onto the wrong album. But maybe faced with the sheer vastness of the ideas, and from a technical point of view a rejigged musical lineup, we should celebrate them for being so bold in their grief rather than pick holes into what it is not, and applaud how they have plunged themselves headfirst into it, presumably at the cost of facing up to some horrific truths about the world today.
Night Life, then, sees The Horrors come almost full circle; their trashy New York Dolls mono beginnings gave way to literal Primary Colours, followed by the rainbow rush of Skying and the veritable kaleidoscopes of further experimentation. Now, in times so bleak, it is difficult to know where to turn; they have fully shut out the light and settled into the sinister black of night.
