The Horrors - V, review

For their next trick, Southend quintet the Horrors reimagine themselves as gloomy Eighties stadium fillers.

Think Gary Numan synths, Depeche Mode entropy and a spellbook of tunes that might have adorned the Donnie Darko soundtrack.

“Are we hologram? Are we vision?” wonders frontman Faris Badwan on the opening track, Hologram.

But thanks to expansive production by Paul Epworth, the despondency is never suffocating.

Of all the band’s incarnations this feels the most apt, a return to their necromantic roots, only with renewed ambition and confidence.

The band’s strengths remain Badwan’s sepulchral baritone, a subtle way with a hook and a rare grasp of architectonics.

What’s new is emotional undertow and the sense of bigness. Songs unfurl slowly over five or six minutes, cresting into surprising new shapes: you can just imagine a twilight crowd swooning to the coda of Ghost, or the outro of Something to Remember Me By.

Fancy, 10 years ago they came over like the sort of band NME writers made up to annoy people.