The Horrors complete their evolution to greatness with V

The first time I ever saw The Horrors, frontman Faris Badwan threw garbage at me. It was an apt metaphor for what the band was doing in those days: Early singles like “Sheena Is A Parasite” and a cover of Screaming Lord Sutch’s “Jack The Ripper” were writhing, germy gobs hocked into that mid-’00s spate of British dance-rock bands, a poisonous antidote to so much pristine, skinny-tie precision, and Badwan and company quickly developed a reputation for being completely fucking batty live. Half the people at that 2007 SXSW showcase I attended came expecting some kind of cartoonish spectacle, and The Horrors certainly delivered. Badwan et al. took the stage dressed in Edwardian black under cascading eaves of hair, a black balloon tied to Badwan’s wrist, each of them looking like a cross between Birthday Party-era Nick Cave and an Edward Gorey drawing. They ripped through a short, furious set composed of its sole album at the time, Strange House, culminating in Badwan striding into the audience, grabbing an overflowing trash can, and launching its beer cans and barbecue wrappers into the packed house. People laughed and cheered; they got the gutter nastiness they came for. I doubt anyone expected to hear from The Horrors next year, or ever again.
But The Horrors surprised everyone, time and again. Their early, brutish sound—a gothic garage-punk amalgam of The Sonics and The Screamers, all yelps and screeching carnival organ—gave way to the stately psychedelic blurs of 2009’s Primary Colours, then to 2011’s majestic Skying and 2014’s gauzily romantic Luminous, which found a transcendent midpoint between grooving shoegaze and the emotive ’80s pomp of Simple Minds. Faced with the inevitable “what’s next?” where so many young bands falter and implode, The Horrors, as primed for burnout as any, made the oddly oft-overlooked choice to take a step back and focus on the music. In the process, they went from garbage-tossing gimmicks to studio rats, marking the difference between bratty kids bashing out some songs to get drink tickets and serious, career musicians. Even in an era that includes Radiohead and Liars, there may be no other modern band who’s achieved such an incredible evolutionary leap.
V, The Horrors’ fifth album, feels like the culmination of that steady, unlikely rise: It’s a swaggering, occasionally self-reflective record that sounds, for lack of a better term, really big. The group recently toured with Depeche Mode, and it seems to have rubbed off—and not just in songs that bear traces of that band’s vibe, from the strobe-lit, black-leather strut of “Machine” and “World Below” to the somberly soulful synth-romance of “Ghost” and “It’s A Good Life.” It’s also there in its own ability to make even smaller, shadowy moments feel arena-ready. But mostly, it’s there in how The Horrors have now amassed a similarly singular body of work that, for all its once-obvious influences, can’t be compared to anything but itself.