The Pop Corporation

With a band name like The Horrors, perhaps it is all a bit much to expect too much cheer on one of their records. With this being 2025, and their first LP arriving in 2007, it seems, The Horrors persist.

They’ve ducked and dived in the shadows of their influences for years, touching on garage punk, goth, drone psych, shoegaze, and even synthpop – this time around, it all feels a bit more industrial as now stripped of most of the original members, we’re left with a nucleus of two, supported by rigid rhythms and all-encompassing walls of drone.

Musically, ‘Night Light’ shows some light and shade, but there’s a whole lot of Sturm und Drang, violent washes of music, emotional intensity, and pitch-black minor key music. Given that they appeared in the lagery burp of The Libertines and the Arctic Monkeys, it was difficult not to root for the group, as they stood against the usual indie toilet circuit Friday night out stuff that enveloped the last big UK rock movement.

While they gathered up fans who preferred black clothes and the art-school BDSM fanzine aesthetic, there was always a sense of opportunities missed by the group, as they ploughed further into their own world, and never quite landing a full blow on the record buying public.

Maybe that was never the point? Instead of aiming for immediacy or greatness, they instead grew like black mold up a shower curtain in a student house, waiting to infect the latest crop of gloomy devotees.

This new LP feels quite well timed, seeing as there’s been a resurgence in the popularity of Trent Reznor’s industrial shag-music, and there’s echoes of Nine Inch Nails all over this record, particularly with ‘Trial By Fire’ and ‘Silent Sister’.

‘When The Rhythm Breaks’ sees a softer approach, which reminds of early ’90s 4AD releases we can’t quite pinpoint, with hypnotic guitar and bruised electronics. Where the LP lands more fully formed is in tracks like ‘Ariel’, which feels like a modern twist of Bauhaus, cut with a Kosmiche drum beat. Altogether, the weight of the world and the feeling of apocalyptic doom leans heavily on this record, and if you want to submit yourself to the bleakness of everything, then this might speak to you.

Those looking for some escape from the unswerving dread, will inevitably feel worn out pretty quickly by ‘Night Life’, which is not to say this is a bad album – it’s just that anyone looking for respite, would be better served elsewhere.

If you seek pace and body-jerking energy from an album to work out the fear of modern living, this album won’t do it for you – this is more an exercise in no light getting in, like a black hole, where everything bends into some all-encompassing chasm of nervous tension.

Compared to almost any other band, this is the sound of almost total alienation. For fans, it’ll be right up their street. For those who have been looking at getting into The Horrors after a number of almost-classics, the impenetrable shadows may summon the feeling of not quite being able to make things out in the half-light.

Comically dark? Crushingly beautiful? Eine kleine nachtmuzak? You’ll have to make your own mind up. Fact is, The Horrors exist in their own lane, which is commendable enough – but given that they exist in a world where they carry the kind of hurt that needs feeding, this might be another record that holds the band just beneath the surface of the waters of ‘cult favourites’.