Hmltd

HMLTD at The Hare & Hounds Birmingham

HMLTD’s third album, FANGS (to be released 23 October, 2026), could not be further away from their last outing, 2023 rock opera The Worm. A return to the band’s origins as purveyors of violent, genre-pushing experimentation, and avant-garde provocation and confrontation, Fangs is a total reinvention and rehabilitation of the goth genre, through the looking glass of post-internet electronic and doomscroll-era dance music. In HMLTD’s version of dance music, cacophonous sub-bass becomes a chthonic call of the void; seraphic rave synths the screech of Valkyries; four-to-the-floor a deathly funeral march. Vampire apocalypse. The result is both unique and terrifying, modern and original, and the dawn of a new era the band call Götherdammerüng - Wagner’s ‘Twilight of the Gods’made Goth.

Devoted disciples of Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘total artwork’), Fangs is the band’s latest exercise in expansive world-building; a practice they have perfected over their near-decade in London’s underground music scene. Their uncompromising live shows have achieved cult status for going far beyond the boundaries of an ordinary gig, harnessing elaborate set design, costume, actors and performance artists to create immersive, multi-sensory, participatory live experiences that blur the boundary between audience and artist.