Far beyond the reaches of the shadows
The Horrors - 'Sea Within A Sea' (Primary Colours - 2009)
In 2006, NME put seven acts on the front cover before their debut album. Dirty Pretty Things, The Raconteurs, The Good, the Bad, & the Queen were all new projects for existing acts so that cuts us down to four. Arctic Monkeys - we’d already seen them at the end of 2005, and they’d win NME’s album of 2006; Lily Allen - drove success through early MySpace exposure, but both her parents do have Wikipedia articles, The Klaxons - would go on to record the magazine’s album of the year in 2007. Finally, in early August, we had this front cover.
At this point, The Horrors had released the single ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’, complete with a video directed by Chris Cunningham (Björk, Madonna, Portishead, Aphex Twin, and lots of other Warp promos) and played a well-attended and talked-about show at The 100 Club earlier that summer. They didn’t release their debut, Strange House, until 2007, and the front cover push seemed slightly strange, given they weren’t sitting on a triplet of well-received singles or a debut single that genuinely moved the dial. Honestly, I paid very little attention to Strange House and assumed I’d not hear much or anything from them again.
With the release of their 2009 album Primary Colours, the Horrors moved away from the garage punk style of their debut, venturing into a more expansive, ethereal, gothic, shoegaze, and post-punk-inspired sound. The closing track, ‘Sea Within A Sea,’ perfectly encapsulates this transformation, an eight-minute epic combining motorik rhythms, synth layers, and Faris Badwan's enigmatic vocals.
Primary Colours was met with critical acclaim, with many praising The Horrors for their bold artistic evolution. ‘Sea Within A Sea’ plays a crucial role in this regard, not just as the album's finale but as the album’s first single and a statement of the band's new direction. Its sprawling structure and layered production showcased a band looking to explore and redefine their sound.
The song begins with a driving bassline reminiscent of krautrock bands like Can or Neu!, setting a hypnotic pace throughout. The introduction of swirling synthesisers and sonic guitar work gradually builds an atmospheric soundscape, leading to a climactic ending that leaves a lasting impression and embodies the album's experimental and boundary-pushing nature.
The song is ambitious and atmospheric, and it’s easy to connect to Portishead, with Geoff Barrow producing, and also that post-punk crate marked Joy Division, with the glacial soundscape recalls ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Decades’ with Badawan aping Ian Curtis, Nick Cave or Ian McCulloch’s deep brooding vocals.
The song has an element of restraint to it. The band made such a scuzzy din on their earlier work that hearing them methodologically power through ‘Sea Within A Sea’ in a way that feels planned and agonised over is a sign of the band’s newfound maturity. Each song on Primary Colours feels like the colours could be like an RGB colour model with a score for either shoegaze, goth or post-punk, giving us several different output colours with various intensities of each.
The song also paints the way forward to their third album, 2011’s Skying, embracing a more lush, expansive sound. The album incorporated various influences, not only the trilogy of flavours on Primary Colours but also getting into psychedelic rock, dream pop and neo-psychedelia. Songs like ‘Still Life’ and ‘Endless Blue’ on the record show that The Horrors could continue the exploration of rich, atmospheric textures and melodic, sweeping compositions by introducing more lush and colourful melodic layers. But ‘Sea Within A Sea’ was the scaffold for that sonic exploration.