Art-rockers HMLTD are waging war against conformity: “Instagram is destroying culture more than we realise”

Stop scrolling. Look up. Exercise your imagination and make your own choices. These are the true desires nestled just below the batshit surface of ‘Fangs’: south London art-rock quartet HMLTD’s audacious third album, where tales of cocks and cuckolds, German philosophy and biblical sacrifice wrestle for airtime under a sonic umbrella that veers from musical theatre to gabber techno to a breed of industrial EDM that they’re calling ‘ÜberGoth’. It’s told through the analogy of gothic horror’s best-dressed baddie, the soul-sucking vampire. But really, ‘Fangs’ is an album about the perils of social media and blindly acquiescing to the algorithm. “The vampire lives this existence bereft of love, bereft of sunlight, bereft of any joy except the addiction of consumption. And I think that modern man is subject to that same narrowing,” says frontman Henry Spychalski. To deliver his treatise on the subject to NME, Spychalski has chosen to meet at Maison Bertaux, a 19th-century French patisserie in the heart of Soho. Like everything about HMLTD, the location is deliberate. With slicked-back, bleached hair and a long, sharp black coat, Spychalski sits down to a cream tea while declaring that he aims to cultivate the life of a “flâneur” – a Baudelairean bohemian – in places like this as often as possible. Verbose and considered, he’s the sort of man who’ll never settle for one syllable when four are available. Yet, in the run-up to ‘Fangs’, the vocalist and his band found themselves losing sight of this steadfast commitment to a life less ordinary that’s been their M.O. since forming a decade ago. A whole album, entitled ‘Where Is The Tunnel, This Must Be The Light’, lies scrapped in HMLTD’s vaults – made over the course of a year, using £40,000 (aka the bulk) of their third album advance. “We recorded it very much as a traditional band in a studio, and I think that what we ended up with was something that we felt very disconnected from. I don’t think it had anything to do with what HMLTD is really about, which has always been experimentation and trying to push the boundaries, even if you fail,” Spychalski says. “We ended up sounding like Neutral Milk Hotel, and I like Neutral Milk Hotel, but I don’t want to be Neutral Milk Hotel because I want to be something new – or at least try to be. I’d rather try and fail to do something new than succeed at doing something that’s already been done.” ‘Fangs’’ sneery, glammy lead single ‘I Used To Ride In Limousines’ acts as a manifesto of sorts. In musical theatre, Spychalski explains, “you have this notion of the ‘I want’ track, where the main character projects their future success and their future glories.” Having signed in their infancy to Sony Music, before soon parting ways and eventually releasing 2020 debut ‘West of Eden’ and its conceptual 2023 follow-up ‘The Worm’ through independent label Lucky Number, HMLTD’s version of the “I want” track became its inverse. “It’s about the ego death that you go through when you have that form of success, and then you lose it in some sense,” the vocalist says. “It’s about wanting to be free of those notions and to have your own totally self-defined version of success that isn’t contingent on any kind of external voice – one that refutes the notion of success full stop, and that actually delights in the liberty of failure.Recommended “As soon as you start trying to manipulate your work in order to appeal to an external audience in any form, you slowly start to become more and more alienated from it. Whether that’s in the context of being on a major label or trying to get X amount of Instagram followers, I don’t think it makes too much of a difference,” he continues. “The point is that you’re prostituting yourself and you’re going to start making work that doesn’t truly reflect you. And with that process, there’s no black-and-white line where a devil comes into the room, and you sign your soul away. It’s far more insidious, and it happens in increments.” “I’d rather try and fail to do something new than succeed at doing something that’s already been done” – Henry Spychalski As pushback, the ethos behind creating ‘Fangs’ became one of “trying to shield yourself from outside influence as much as possible”. During the bulk of its creation, Spychalski downgraded to a “dumb phone”. To make the album, the band – completed by guitarists Duc Peterman and Theo Spark, and drummer Andrei Martynchyk – decamped to the French countryside for a month, to a “crumbling, decadent, gothic old house surrounded by vineyards” where the only thing to do was create. At the start of that period, Spychalski lost his voice, “so I just read vociferously and really immersed myself in a few books which largely informed the world of the album – Revolutionary Demonology by this Italian occult philosophy collective called Gruppo di Nun, and a lot of Julian Evola, who’s a kind of early 20th-century spiritual fascist.” Proudly intellectual (“I think that one of the reasons why guitar music is dying as a genre is because it assumes far too little of its audience,” suggests Spychalski) yet riddled with pithy one-liners, winks and the sort of pounding beats made for dark rooms and strobe lights, HMLTD’s work demands that it’s possible to be both serious and fun. “If I’m writing a song about vampires on New Year’s Eve or ketamine or cuckoldry, I’m trying to think, ‘OK, how can I work a reference to Wagner into this? How can I use this to talk about Hegel?’ I love high culture, and I love low culture. The only thing that I really abhor – which I think is the dominant cultural mode of our time – is mid-brow culture,” the frontman argues. It’s this homogeneous levelling out of ideas that HMLTD are most repulsed by. “I’m not saying anything original here, but Instagram is destroying culture and destroying art more than we realise,” Spychalski states. Instead, ‘Fangs’’ Venn diagram of inspirations feels genuinely unique to its authors. ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ is like a Slavic Sweeney Todd: an uproarious knees-up born for the stage. HMLTD. Credit: Rose Mihman “People sometimes accuse us of trying to be cool, but if you listen to ‘Chateau Vamp Freestyle’ then there’s no way that you can possibly level that accusation at us. I think what makes us good as a band is actually that willingness to put our neck on the line and be ready to receive ridicule,” Spychalski suggests. Meanwhile, ‘Close To You’ might be the only song in history that sounds like Crystal Castles but references The Carpenters. “Why do bats suddenly appear / Every time you are near?” goes one particularly amusing line. There are happy hardcore songs about obsessive lust (‘Blitzkrieg’) and multiple lyrics that reflect how “masculinity is in a deep moment of crisis”. In just one verse of juddering opening track ‘What The Hell’, the frontman manages to reference Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, tennis star Maria Sharapova and the musical alter-egos of his bandmates, Skinship (Spark) and Saigon Fury (Peterman). HMLTD’s third is a record that will have you looking up reference points and going down information wormholes at every turn. It’s willfully, wildly curious, and it hopes the same for its listener. “I am really proud to be a try-hard. I think that we all have to try really, really hard just to stay sane at the moment because the internet, and social media in particular, is destroying the western world from the inside out. It’s a cancer,” Spychalski says. “So I want my music to hopefully [open the door] to other ideas in the same way that a lot of the artists that I listened to growing up did for me. I discovered Albert Camus through The Cure song ‘Killing An Arab’; I discovered English new wave cinema through Morrissey. When artists introduce you to these other ideas, whatever they are, it becomes a gateway to a whole world beyond the music itself.” Step into the world of HMLTD and ‘Fangs’, and you’re in for one hell of a ride. HMLTD’s ‘Fangs’ is out now via Lucky Number.