Albums of the Year 2025: #52

Nearly 20 years since they first began, 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 shoegaze-nodding sharp left on their Mercury-nominated follow up Primary Colours, since the beginning they’ve roamed between genres and atmospheres freely.

Skying won the NME Award for Best Album in 2011; 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 visceral new chapter with their most industrial, uncompromising output yet. Whilst the end results have changed, however, at their core has always been the same unbending commitment and bloody-minded allegiance to the cause.

The Horrors are not and will never be a band that approaches the job lightly. They’re musicians who’ll funnel everything they are into the process, at the expense of health, wealth, and sometimes sanity. And so, whilst sixth album Night Life sees the band once more shapeshift into a new form, with a new sonic outlook and - this time - a new lineup, in some ways The Horrors are still as they ever were.

We Can Never Say Goodbye (Demo) Flexi - "We Can Never Say Goodbye" is an electro punk mantra inspired by the minimal vocal style of Chicago acid head Green Velvet. It was written in my North London basement flat in June 2023, the month before we commenced recording with Yves in LA (Rhys).