The Horrors release ‘Ariel’, the brooding opening track from their forthcoming sixth album Night Life, out March 21 via Fiction Records.
Alongside the album’s latest single, the band have also announced a run of UK instore dates including Rough Trade East on album release day, ahead of a string of Spain and Portugal live shows.
“‘Ariel’ is a particularly special track, and a group favourite.” explains the band; “It’s probably unlike any song we’ve written before, and kind of marks the beginning of a new chapter. We are always looking to explore new sonic territories and find new ways for the band to sound, it’s probably what we enjoy most about being in The Horrors. Ariel was very much a studio creation – we put a distortion-heavy demo down at home and started moulding it into something more subtle at Holy Mountain with Yves. Amelia then added her world of chopped-up rhythms and vocal splices and it felt like we’d reached a new place. The Horrors of the future.”
Listen to ‘Ariel’ on our Blackburn Rovers Fan playlist.
As The Horrors approach their 20th anniversary as a band, Night Life sees them shapeshift into a new form, with a new sonic outlook and a new line up centred around the core duo of vocalist Faris Badwan and bassist Rhys Webb, now joined by Amelia Kidd on keys and Telegram’s Jordan Cook on drums, making the new album the band’s first to not feature all five original members.
The resulting album is a record of weight and space, of melancholy and euphoria; a record that has the ability to make bedfellows of seemingly disparate ideas as only The Horrors can. The Night Life here is not the vim and vigour of pubs and clubs. It’s the thoughts that happen under the cover of darkness; the places your mind takes you when the rest of the world is asleep. A record born out of a desire to revive the raw, instinctive spirit of the band’s early work.
After nearly 20 years making music, there are few bands who’ve created a canon as determinedly innovative and consistently critically-acclaimed as The Horrors. Emerging as zeitgeist-shaking garage-goths on their 2007 debut Strange House, before taking a sharp left turn for their Mercury-nominated follow up Primary Colours, since the beginning they’ve roamed freely between genres. 2011’s Skying won the NME Award for Best Album; V was heralded as “a triumph” in a five-star Guardian review, while 2021’s pair of EPs – Lout and Against The Blade – marked a new chapter with their most industrial, uncompromising output yet.
