A Different Kind of Chaos: Q&A with Faris Badwan and Rhys Webb of The Horrors

Words by Mat Osman 
Photography by Tom Oldham

It’s the hottest day of the year in London and rack upon rack of black clothes, leather boots and studded collars are being wheeled into a sweatbox of Hackney Studios. I’m here talking to The Horrors just as London is waking up from lockdown. They’ve since released some of the most brutal, punishing music of their 15-year career.

The Lout EP with its industrial rhythms, blackened techno and S&M lyrics is as The Horrors have always been: gloriously out of step with the current scene. In an era where it’s become the new orthodoxy that music should be healing and positive, this is the polar opposite: a brutal, punishing racket. I asked band members Faris Badwan and Rhys Webb whether they’d planned to make music so against the zeitgeist.

Faris: Not really. We’ve learnt that we can’t do anything deliberately. We can’t plan at all. It was just the result of working remotely and feeling the frustration that other people do. Music like this feels like a release. I’ve never felt more free than I do now.

Rhys: We released Lout on the very first day that people were allowed to meet up again. It was like our howl into the wind and I think that people needed that energy, that ferocious blast. The whole thing was written back and forth as we explored remote working. We recorded guitars in my front room so it’s the most DIY, self-produced thing we’ve done so far. And for me the energy and excitement and the attitude is the closest we’ve felt to our early stuff. It’s been hard with what’s been going on over the last twelve months but our attitude has been, “right, let’s just do it, quickly.”

Faris: Lout is brutal but in a more of an effective way than the first record. We’ve learnt how to keep the rough elements. Sometimes when you’re in a big studio you can lose those human connections. “Machine” on the last record [ V ] hinted towards these kinds of sounds so it’s not completely new to us.

If you’d asked me what kind of music I was looking for at the moment it would have been something soothing and soulful. And then I heard Lout and I was blown away. I didn’t think I was looking for something this aggressive at the moment.

Faris: That’s the ideal, really. You release something that people don’t realize is what they want until they hear it. It’s just a true expression of what we’re doing and what we want to communicate and whenever you do that, it just works. It’s the music we’re excited to be doing.

What was the musical template behind the record? I hear bits of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails in there, some metal, some techno even some of the glitchy pop of artists like the late musician, SOPHIE.

Faris: We never have a template. It’s just a different kind of chaos each time. Usually we just make a record. Then it’s only in the reviews that we get presented with a list of references. I’ve actually often discovered great music that way. Sophie was one of my oldest friends though and I learnt a lot from her. I love that world and I love that pop went that way. But we’ve also been quite into black metal recently and that can be really uplifting. The nonstop punishment of it puts you in a good place— [laughter]. If you make something that has that urgency and truth to it then people will respond. I don’t really think about how it’s going to be taken on by other people. That’s not up to me.

Rhys: When we did the first record we had no interest in trying to sound like the music we love because within the group there’s people into all kinds of things. Tom’s into hip hop. Joe’s into hard techno. Faris has done film music. But we’ve never wanted to sound like someone else. There’s no desire to recreate something.

I have to admit that when I first heard you play I loved the band but I couldn’t imagine it having a long career. It felt like one of those Sex Pistols things: piss everyone off and then explode in a mess of acrimony. But here you are 15 years later making astounding music while most of your contemporaries have split up.