It’s hard to categorise five-piece south London band HMLTD by genre. Often described as ‘underground punks’, glam-rock, experimental, New Romantics, their first album West of Eden was released days before the world went into lockdown in early 2020. Today, they’re opting for ‘operatic rock’. Their sophomore album, The Worm (out today), draws on frontman Henry Spychalski’s own psycho-spiritual struggles, politics, and disdain for systems of power, influenced by a range of sounds from Broadway musicals to classical symphonies.
“We’ve matured as people and naturally when you mature as people you start listening to classical music. With this album we’ve made it a lot more organic and tried to make it so it’s all played by live instruments. We’ve got a 16-piece orchestra and a gospel choir, everything is played very acoustically, it sounds a lot more organic.” says 27-year-old Spychalski, who grew up in Torquay and is now south London-based along with bandmates Achilleas Sarantaris, Duc Peterman, Nico Mohnblatt and Seth Evans.
It’d be fair to say that since NME dubbed them the ‘UK’s most thrilling new band” back in 2017, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Prior to the release of their first album, the band cut ties with major record label Sony, lost a band member, scrapped what they’d been working on and signed to indie label Lucky Number. Their tour ground to an abrupt halt when covid hit and each time they overcame a challenge a new one would present itself. It’s no wonder then that their latest album comes with a sense of frustration, explored through the perspective of a narrator plagued by inner demons - or rather, ‘worms’, as Spychalski explains.
“It’s a concept album about worms in various guises. One of those guises is capitalist realism. It plays on the idea of an ouroboros worm that has swallowed its own tail and the universe is stuck within, a kind of modern metaphor for capitalist realist society. Stuck inside the belly of the worm and we can’t see a way out. It’s also a symbol for man’s inner demons externalised. In the album the narrator is plagued by inner demons which are parasitic worms that take the form of self-doubt, self-hatred, envy, narcissism, depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. These are externalised outwards into a gargantuan worm that swallows England and the narrator has to slay it to conquer his own inner demons.”
Those hoping to catch the band on tour this year may also find themselves having to buy a plane ticket. “We didn’t want to do a tour of England because I just hate it. I just don’t like England so my idea of driving around in a van is my idea of hell. I like playing the shows and meeting people - especially up north, people are a lot nicer up there. But the actual day-to-day of driving along motorways when you can’t eat healthily or go running. It’s all just grim,” says Spychalski.
To mark the release of The Worm, we asked the band to pick their top five tracks for a Friday night… though a slightly more sombre one than usual: “a lot of Friday nights I don’t go out, I just stay in and spend time with my worms in their various guises, so it’s not a particularly upbeat playlist.”
Listen to HMLTD’s full Friday night playlist here.
“This song is a cover of Jacques Brel’s Au Suivant. In the sixties, Scott Walker covered about ten of Jacques Brel’s songs and translated them into the anglophone tongue. His translations are the best and he’s probably the only anglophonic singer who really captures the spirit and ethos, emotions, charisma and humour of Jacques Brel. This song is about being in the army and being sent to a brothel to lose his virginity and feeling overcome by male insecurity. It’s a really amazing song, the lyrics are fantastic and Scott Walker’s delivery is just totally bombastic. That’s a song I would use to hype me up when getting ready for a night out.”
Narcissus by Sir John Betjeman
“Sir John Betjeman was the poet laureate at Oxford at one point. He’s one of the most beloved and revered English poets of the 20th century. He made this album Late Flowering Love, which is a collaboration with a composer called Jim Parker. It’s basically a series of spoken word poems delivered by Betjeman over these beautiful orchestral arrangements. This one is particularly beautiful.”
Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano
“This one has a really interesting story behind it. It came out in the seventies and at the time in Italy the charts were dominated by English and American pop music. Adriano Celentano would only ever sing in Italian at the time. He slightly abhorred the domination of the charts by this foreign tongue and so he argued that anybody could record any old nonsense in the English language and it would be more successful than an Italian song because Italians were drawn to it, even though it was kind of contentless. He wrote Prisencolinensinainciusol and collaborated with linguists to create a song that sounded like it was English but was actually pure nonsense. It’s a four minute long song and it all sounds like it’s in English but he’s actually saying nothing to prove his original point, which was that anybody could record anything in English and it would be successful in Italy. It became his most successful song and got to number one in the Italian charts.”
“This song resonates with me on a very deep level because it corresponds to some of my life experiences of growing up in a small town and everybody assuming that you’re gay because you have a certain flamboyance, or a certain femininity, that doesn’t necessarily conform to the toxic male culture around you. In the song, Momus’ character embraces this perception and uses it as a disguise to seduce women. It’s very tongue-in-cheek, very provocative, it’s a great track.”
The Hell Of It by Paul Williams (from the musical Phantom of the Paradise, 1974)
“Just before we started working on The Worm, Duc [HMLTD guitarist and producer] and I were working on a Broadway musical about the life and times of Jobriath - the first openly gay rockstar to sign a major record deal in the US. In preparation we were listening to lots of musicals. We really liked Jesus Christ Superstar, Cabaret, and our absolute favourite, Phantom of the Paradise. It’s totally batshit crazy. This song is written by Paul Williams who also did the Bugsy Malone soundtrack, it’s the song that closes the musical. It had a big impact on us and our writing - working on this musical definitely informed The Worm. If you listen to the album it’s definitely a musical.”
