Brixton’s The Windmill is easily the most discussed music venue of the decade. Its 150-capacity room nurtured an eccentric art rock community, birthing now-renowned acts Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and the Last Dinner Party. It sparked a wave of jazzy, multi-instrumentalist musicians worldwide, from English Teacher (Leeds) to Geese (New York City) to Hesse Kassel (Santiago, Chile). HMLTD were among the first artists from the venue to gain attention, before the press had even decided the Windmill was South London’s supposed hub of eclecticism. While their contemporaries performed brooding music, donning drab, working-class garb for post-punk credibility, HMLTD stood out like a sore thumb with their multicoloured, aristocratic glam and theatre kid antics.
Their early material shared the scene’s genre-agnostic unpredictability, colliding the post-punk and Americana of their contemporaries with trap, industrial, EBM, classical or whatever they felt like on that day. Grouped with the rest of the scene, its intentional refusal to be categorised became a category itself.
The rest of the scene didn’t catch up to HMLTD’s glamtics until they played into their most dignified, classical tendencies on the high-fantasy art-rock opera The Worm (2023). Quickly, a sect of their scene arose unified by a conscious use of image, whether it be regality, gothicism or Hedi Slimane rock-sthetics. The Worm’s most accessible elements laid a baroque pop foundation on which the Last Dinner Party found fame.
Fangs is HMLTD’s shift into the darker tones of goth and industrial rock, incorporating each genre’s tropes of mechanical rhythms, DX7-inspired synth work and low-register vocals into their established methods. They maintain their theatrical zaniness and upbeat tone, but also add another notch to the world’s post-2022 obsession with gothic rock.
For the album, they have coined the genre “übergöth”, or the more verbose “götherdammerüng”; a portmanteau of “goth” and “götterdämmerung” (German for “twilight of the gods”). It represents a broader shift over the past three years of Windmill groups incorporating its framework of eclectic style shifts and non-rock instrumentation (mostly brass, violins and woodwind) into gothic tones; see Tiss Vampiric, Heartworms and Jesus and the Zealots.
“Chateau Vamp Freestyle” and “Shudder” represent the most overt goth pastiches of Fangs, however entirely different sides. “Chateau Vamp Freestyle” is a piece of deathrock cabaret, most similar to Tiss Vampyric in its piano-centric, brass- and accordion-inflected crescendo form, or, more classically, Sex Gang Children. In contrast, “Shudder” recalls Wolfsheim’s dancey, radio-worthy darkwave. Its faster tempo pushes the song toward the genre’s concurrent adoption by former horror hardcore bands, such as AFI’s “Holy Visions” or Creeper’s “Lover’s Led Astray”.
At times, vocalist Henry Spychalski adopts the ghostly, chest voice lows of the album’s main reference points. In the early tracks, this takes a Trent Reznor-esque vocal-fry approach. By “Closer to You”, it has morphed into Justin Warfield’s She Wants Revenge timbre, one more emotive than the genre’s dominant monotone Andrew Eldritch impressions. During the bridge of “Grab the Crucifix”, Spychalski even briefly executes a high-register, croaking black metal scream, but it sits alongside his established musical theatre tenor.
What keeps Fangs sounding unique is its incorporation of contemporary adjacent styles. The most prominent of which is the post-hyperpop breed of electropoppers like Charli XCX and Slayyyter. The genre’s rhythms and rap-sing cadences permeate “What the Hell”, “Umami”, “Dancing on Your Grave” and “One Thousand White Horses”.
Although seemingly unorthodox on the surface, hyperpop and electropop are colloquially intertwined with the Windmill; the controversial neologism “indie sleaze” has permeated online spaces since 2021 as a descriptor for the Hedi Slimane-influenced fashion worn by indie rockers and club kids alike in the mid-2000s. Many bands in the scene were later credited as part of the same wave of mid-2000s nostalgia. The first verse riff of “I Used to Ride in Limousines” even recalls the new rock revival, the era’s Slimane-dressed focal point. All the while, darkwave and electropop share an origin in synthpop.
Fangs‘ lyrics are told from the perspective of a hard-partying vampire. As a concept album, it uses this as a device to criticize late-stage capitalism. It relates the creature’s need to convert humans to the Global North’s culture of overconsumption. This choice also intertwines with the Windmill, echoing recent adoptions of the creature by Opus Kink and Wednesday’s Child. Its methods play into the campness of this topic, using time-worn pop culture references for legitimately funny humour. In “Grab the Crucifix”, Spychalski sings “There is the chair, like a cuck, watching life fuck my wife.” In “What the Hell”, he states, “Make me feel like 2012, the way she bad, like Joseph Kony.”
In “I Used to Ride in Limousines”, Spychalski even forms his own past into a meta-intertext, referencing his relationship with the Last Dinner Party vocalist Abigail Morris. Its title and opening line mirror her band’s “Sail Away”, which opens with “We used to ride in limousines”, a song Spychalski has a writing credit on.
On Fangs, HMLTD craft a truly unique update of styles from across the broader goth spectrum, from dark cabaret and deathrock to darkwave. Their dedication to eclecticism never lets up, but it always feels natural, still meaningfully engaging with both the culture surrounding them and the history that produced it. Fang is the progressive, art rock opera album of the resurgent goth generation.