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 5 original members. While demos began modestly in Webb’s basement flat in North London with the pair thriving on the immediacy of, as Faris describes, “shortening the distance between having an idea and expressing it”, the record truly took shape in LA under the guidance of producer Yves Rothman (Yves Tumor, Blondshell) before finishing touches were applied back in London along with guitarist Josh Hayward, with Kidd bouncing parts and production ideas remotely from Glasgow.

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.