There’s something really powerful and undeniable about V’s songs that suggests it could provide the most unlikely twist in an unlikely story: the Horrors actually becoming as big as the overheated hype announced they would a decade ago. Whether that happens or not, it’s a triumph.
V maintains a distinctively elegant gloom, The Horrors continuing to find intoxicating new shades within their gray moods. It’s an album that confirms them as one of the most consistently surprising, most artistically sophisticated, simply greatest rock bands working today.
The Horrors have never been afraid to push their sound to new and interesting places. So it comes as no surprise to find that V continues that trend by matching their anthemic side with a desire to “get nasty” and make something “quite unsettling”.
V isn’t a huge reinvention, more a subtle reboot, and a move which has worked out perfectly. The Horrors are hardly new to making brilliant albums - they did that with their previous three - but V is better than them all.
V could very well be the album that pushes The Horrors to the next echelon, something the group has already accomplished in its native U.K. with its last two albums breaking the top 10 charts. This is an unrealistic expectation Stateside, but V certainly has the chops to propel them up a level or two in the American public's consciousness.
Overall, V feels like a consolidation of all of the strengths that The Horrors have built up over the last ten years, tightly bundled and perfectly accessible without sacrificing any of their artistic integrity.
On V, the Horrors have got their mojo back. They sound lean, keen and mean but with songs to match the swagger. This is the album the band needed to make.
While the band's fifth album sounds expectedly stadium-sized, bringing another pair of ears into the fold seems to have pushed the Horrors to make the biggest changes to their music since Primary Colours.
After 2014’s slightly aimless Luminous, the Horrors’ fifth album finds them recapturing the focus of their earlier triumphs
#8 | / | Gigwise |
#9 | / | Clash |
#12 | / | NZ Herald |
#13 | / | Fopp |
#13 | / | Q Magazine |
#14 | / | State |
#14 | / | Under the Radar |
#15 | / | musicOMH |
#15 | / | The Guardian |
#18 | / | The A.V. Club |