Album Review

HMLTD – FANGS

Words by The Pit Standard

HMLTD spent a year making an indie album, finished it, hated it and deleted the lot. It is an unusually expensive way to discover what a band stands for, but the decision tells you plenty about FANGS. Their third album abandons the conventional guitar-band format for something far more volatile, dragging goth through the club until the two become difficult to separate.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Where 2023's The Worm enlisted a 16-piece orchestra for its sprawling rock opera, FANGS was built with Ableton, electronic production and a willingness to make a mess. The change in personnel, with Theo Spark and Andrei Martynchyk joining original members Henry Spychalski and Duc Peterman, accompanies a return to the confrontational experimentation of HMLTD's early days. The results arrive under a suitably ridiculous name: Götherdammerüng, or ÜberGöth.

The album's vampire mythology might sound like an excuse for another elaborate aesthetic, but there's a more pointed idea lurking beneath the fangs and ruined castles. HMLTD see vampirism in a culture that consumes endlessly, chasing approval through social media, status and productivity while becoming increasingly depleted in the process. The dancefloor becomes a fitting setting for this particular horror story: a place of collective release that can also leave you feeling utterly alone.

‘I Used To Ride In Limousines’ gets to the heart of that contradiction. Its restless electronic pulse propels a song about success, failure and the exhausting business of trying to become somebody. Rather than treating ambition as an unquestioned virtue, HMLTD ask what happens when the pursuit of achievement becomes the whole point of living. It's a sharp idea delivered with enough momentum to avoid sounding like a lecture.

‘Umami’ pushes further into the album's appetite for sensory overload, while ‘Dancing On Your Grave’ finds dark humour in its gothic menace. ‘Close To You’ twists the familiar shape of a love song into something more sinister, and ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ takes a detour into the band's more unruly experimental instincts. There is little interest in making these tracks behave like conventional rock songs. Beats lurch, synths flare and the vocals move between sneer, howl and outright aggression.

‘Blitzkrieg’ is among the album's most forceful moments, its abrasive electronic assault carrying the confrontational spirit HMLTD have long claimed as their own. The closing ‘Sorry For Laughing’, featuring French goth outfit Corpus Delicti, brings a darker, more atmospheric finish to a record that has spent much of its running time trying to provoke a reaction.

For all its talk of decay and modern life, FANGS is not a joyless exercise in doom. Much of its appeal lies in the gap between the music's physical rush and the uncomfortable ideas underneath. A beat can be irresistible while the world described over it is thoroughly rotten. HMLTD understand that pleasure and unease are not mutually exclusive, and the album is at its best when it refuses to resolve the tension.

The sheer volume of ideas can occasionally work against them. HMLTD have a tendency to push everything towards maximum intensity, and some passages threaten to become swallowed by their own excess. Yet the album's rougher edges feel earned rather than decorative. After abandoning a record they considered too safe, the band have made something that takes real pleasure in risk.

FANGS doesn't offer a neat escape from the world it criticises. Instead, it invites you onto the dancefloor, turns up the bass and lets the horror reveal itself when you least expect it. HMLTD's reinvention is noisy, darkly funny and gloriously strange, even when its ambition gets the better of it.