HMLTD Have Built Their Own Version of Goth

With FANGS, the London band swap rock opera for rave electronics, black-metal screams and a world populated by vampires, clubs and late-capitalist decay.

HMLTD are back, and this time they have invented their own genre to go with them.

The London band have named the sound of their forthcoming third album FANGS ÜberGöth, also referred to as Götherdämmerung. The name borrows from Wagner's Götterdämmerung, turning its “Twilight of the Gods” into something closer to a “Twilight of the Goths”.

It is an appropriately excessive name for a record that appears to have little interest in doing things by halves.

The transformation is particularly striking when compared with 2023's The Worm. That record was a rock opera built around a 16-piece orchestra. FANGS strips much of that away. The orchestra has been replaced with Ableton, four-to-the-floor beats and rave synths, while the gospel choir has given way to guttural gothic vocals and black-metal screams.

The influences make the direction clearer. HMLTD have returned to the EBM and goth records that informed their earlier work, citing Fad Gadget, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Bauhaus, while pulling in more recent references including Crystal Castles, German hardcore, Justice and 2020s sleazepop.

But FANGS isn't simply an exercise in digging through the goth archives.

The record's central imagery revolves around vampires, consumption and the feeling of being trapped inside a culture that never stops demanding more. HMLTD frame the vampire as a useful metaphor for modern life: endlessly consuming while producing very little of its own. The club becomes an extension of that idea, with the album moving between dancefloor energy and something considerably darker underneath.

That tension is already apparent in the music released so far.

“Blitzkrieg”, released in July, introduced the new direction. “I Used To Ride In Limousines”, released in September, takes a more direct look at success and failure, with the band describing it as an attempt to make peace with failure and find a sense of self-worth outside conventional ideas of achievement.

There is also a more unusual story behind the album itself. HMLTD say they initially spent a year making a traditional guitar, bass and drums record before abandoning it altogether. The experience pushed them back towards the DIY experimentation that had defined the band in the first place. Theo Spark and Andrei Martynchyk subsequently joined original members Henry Spychalski and Duc Peterman, with much of the new material beginning in Martynchyk's Farringdon basement studio before the band decamped to a ruined château in the Loire Valley.

The result is FANGS, an 11-track album that includes “Blitzkrieg”, “I Used To Ride In Limousines”, “Dancing On Your Grave” and “Sorry For Laughing”, the latter featuring French goth band Corpus Delicti. It arrives 23 October 2026 via Lucky Number.

And HMLTD are already taking the new world beyond the record. Their current live schedule includes Sŵn Festival in Cardiff, Arise Festival in Berlin and a London show at Village Underground on 4 March 2027.

For HMLTD, goth isn't being treated as something to faithfully preserve. They're pulling it apart, feeding it through the club, the internet and their own increasingly strange mythology, then seeing what survives.

If ÜberGöth is the answer, FANGS looks set to be the experiment.