HMLTD announce third album FANGS and new ‘ÜberGöth’ era

Photo: Rose Mihman

HMLTD have announced their third album, FANGS, trading the orchestral scale of The Worm for rave synths, gothic horror and a new self-described genre: “Götherdammerüng”.

HMLTD will release FANGS on 23 October via Lucky Number, marking another hard turn for a band that has spent its career dodging anything that looks too much like a comfort zone.

The 11-track record follows 2023 rock opera The Worm, but its scale has been deliberately pulled apart. The 16-piece orchestra is gone. In its place are Ableton sessions, side-chained four-to-the-floor rhythms, rave synths, industrial abrasion, gothic howls and black-metal screams. HMLTD have given the sound its own name, “Götherdammerüng”, or “ÜberGöth”, an intentionally overblown label for a record that pulls goth, EBM and club music into the same room.

That reinvention came after a false start. According to the band, they spent much of the year after The Worm making a more conventional indie record centred on a traumatic breakup. By the time it was finished, they hated it. Frontman Henry Spychalski said the abandoned album represented the kind of artistic safety the group had always tried to avoid, so they scrapped it and effectively began again with little money left.

Starting from zero pushed the band back towards a DIY setup and coincided with a line-up change. Theo Spark and Andrei Martynchyk joined Spychalski and original member Duc Peterman, with early work on the new material beginning in Martynchyk’s Farringdon basement studio.

What does HMLTD’s new era sound like?

“I Used To Ride In Limousines” is the clearest introduction so far. Released alongside the album announcement, the track turns the language of success and failure into something stranger and more self-aware than a standard comeback song. HMLTD describe it as a rejection of the idea that a life has to be productive, measurable or externally successful to have value.

The accompanying video was directed by Spychalski, continuing a visual thread established with earlier single “Blitzkrieg”. That track, HMLTD’s first new music since The Worm, arrived in July and was framed by the band as a return to “radical experimentation” and music as confrontation.

Sonically, FANGS reaches backwards and sideways at once. The band cite early industrial and goth acts including Fad Gadget, DAF, Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Bauhaus, alongside Crystal Castles, German hardcore, 2000s blog-house and newer sleazepop. Cult French goth group Corpus Delicti also appear on closing track “Sorry For Laughing”.

The result is deliberately club-facing. HMLTD say some of the new material is built to work on the dancefloor even when the lyrics are doing something much darker underneath. That tension seems central to the album: euphoric synths, pounding bass and four-to-the-floor rhythms carrying songs about consumption, decay and the uglier side of modern life.

Why vampires?

The album’s visual and lyrical world took shape after the band decamped to a ruined château in France’s Loire Valley. They say they largely cut themselves off while working there, leaving only for supplies, and became increasingly absorbed in vampire mythology, gothic literature and the older EBM records that had influenced HMLTD in their early years.

On FANGS, the vampire becomes less a horror-film prop than a way of talking about endless consumption. The band draw a parallel between the undead figure, surviving by consuming without ever being satisfied, and a modern culture built around desire, image and constant acquisition.

That idea spills into the record’s treatment of club culture too. HMLTD contrast the collectivism associated with earlier rave movements with a more contemporary world of clout, self-documentation and status. It is heavy conceptual territory, but the band have stressed that FANGS is also supposed to be funny and immediately physical. The point is not to make an academic goth record. It still has to hit when the bass comes in.

When are HMLTD playing live?

The new era will move onto the stage over the coming months. HMLTD are due at Sŵn Festival in Cardiff in October, followed by a sold-out Club Cheek show in London on 26 October and Arise Festival in Berlin on 7 November.

They have also announced their next London headline date at Village Underground on 4 March 2027, giving the band a larger home-city stage for the FANGS material after the album arrives.