THE HORRORS RELEASE ‘TRIAL BY FIRE‘ FROM NEW STUDIO ALBUM NIGHT LIFE OUT 21 MARCH 2025
To mark Halloween, English rock band The Horrors today release the brooding single “Trial By Fire”, the second track from their recently announced sixth studio album Night Life, out Friday 21 March 2025 via Fiction Records / Virgin Music Group.
“‘Trial By Fire’ is one of the more aggressive songs on Night Life, bridging the gap between our two industrial EPs and the new album,” explain the band; “Rhys began the demo in Southend isolation, before we got together and twisted it into something meaner. It’s about the curses that follow you through your life. For The Horrors, every day is Halloween.”
The single builds on the album’s initial offering, “The Silence That Remains”, a both propulsive and understated track featuring the duet vocals of Faris Badwan and new keyboardist Amelia Kidd. The release marked the dawn of a new era for the band, drawing their recent industrial experimentation together with The Horrors’ signature motoring rhythms.
As The Horrors approach their 20th anniversary as a band, Night Life sees them shapeshift into a new form, centred around the core duo of vocalist Faris Badwan and bassist Rhys Webb, now joined by Amelia Kidd and Telegram’s Jordan Cook on drums. This new album will be the band’s first release without featuring all five 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. Night Life 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 with their 2007 debut Strange House, the band took a sharp left turn with their Mercury-nominated follow-up Primary Colours, roaming freely between genres since the very beginning. 2011’s Skying won the NME Award for Best Album, their fifth 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.
The Horrors have sold out eight of the nine shows on their upcoming UK run, a string of intimate performances that includes a stop at London’s ICA, set to begin on November 27, 2024. Head to thehorrors.co.uk for more info.
“Trial By Fire” by The Horrors is out now.
The Horrors’ sixth studio album Night Life arrives Friday 21 March 2025.
Night Life tracklisting
1. Ariel
2. Silent Sister
3. The Silence That Remains
4. Trial By Fire
5. The Feeling Is Gone
6. Lotus Eater
7. More Than Life
8. When The Rhythm Breaks
9. LA Runaway
