Art-rockers HMLTD are waging war against conformity: “Instagram is destroying culture more than we realise”

Stop scrolling. Look up. Exercise your imagination and make your own choices. These are the true desires nestled just below the batshit surface of ‘Fangs’: south London art-rock quartet HMLTD’s audacious third album, where tales of cocks and cuckolds, German philosophy and biblical sacrifice wrestle for airtime under a sonic umbrella that veers from musical theatre to gabber techno to a breed of industrial EDM that they’re calling ‘ÜberGoth’. It’s told through the analogy of gothic horror’s best-dressed baddie, the soul-sucking vampire. But really, ‘Fangs’ is an album about the perils of social media and blindly acquiescing to the algorithm. “The vampire lives this existence bereft of love, bereft of sunlight, bereft of any joy except the addiction of consumption. And I think that modern man is subject to that same narrowing,” says frontman Henry Spychalski. To deliver his treatise on the subject to NME, Spychalski has chosen to meet at Maison Bertaux, a 19th-century French patisserie in the heart of Soho. Like everything about HMLTD, the location is deliberate. With slicked-back, bleached hair and a long, sharp black coat, Spychalski sits down to a cream tea while declaring that h...