Art-Rock Maestros HMLTD talk stellar debut, social collapse and PornHub

It’s hard to believe that HMLTD’s February gig in Dublin’s Sound House may be one of the final gigs I’ll attend this year. Certainly, on the evening of February 18, any thoughts of a looming global pandemic were a long way from my mind, as I made my way up the stairs of the Wiley Fox pub on Eden Quay to the Sound House on the second floor.

There, I found HMLTD in the middle of a soundcheck, with frontman Henry Spychalski experiencing some frustration with his in-ear monitors. He never resolved the problem to his satisfaction, with the London art-rockers’ tour manager left to try and remedy the situation before show-time.

Meanwhile, Spychalski and I headed downstairs to the Sound House bar for a deep dive into HMLTD’s career to date. Boasting a glam-freak look and an experimental edge that suggested they could be rock’s saviours, HMLTD were one of the most exciting bands to emerge at the end of the last decade. However, their early momentum was derailed when their label tried to remould them into radio-friendly unit shifters.

It was a wildly misguided approach, and Spychalski and co. were left to lick their wounds before finally re-emerging with one of 2020’s best albums, West Of Eden, a record that nicely balances their pop and avant-garde sensibilities. Fittingly, given what was around the corner, one of the album’s primary themes is the social and spiritual collapse of the west.

A lot friendlier than his icy public persona might suggest, Spychalski proves hugely engaging throughout one of his most in-depth interviews yet…

Paul Nolan: The last time I saw HMLTD play was at the Workmans Club in 2017 – the journey since must have had more twists and turns than you could ever have expected.

Henry Spychalski: The good thing is that I think they’ve all been worth it. I look at the album we have, I look at how long it’s taken to produce it, I look at all the struggle that’s gone into it – and I know that the album is a thousand times richer as a result. Because that struggle has informed the album so much and the album kind of breathes it.

It breathes that struggle with self-confidence, self-image and willpower. All stuff we hadn’t properly experienced before in our lives, I guess being such privileged individuals, coming from a white middle class English background. But this really forced us into some very dark places psychologically, in terms of our self-esteem and so on. I think the album is a billion times better than it ever could have been had we just released it in 2018.

If HMLTD had happened in the ’90s, I’ve no doubt that, like Suede, you would have been straight on the cover of Melody Maker and your album would have been number one. Is it more difficult to get into the popular consciousness now?

Partly, although any bands in the ’90s who could have had that trajectory – like Suede, Pulp or Blur – were supported by the industry. And the reality is that the British music industry’s major alternative institutions have always shunned us, basically.

Really?!

Radio 6, which is supposed to be an outlet for alternative, challenging music, has played us a grand total of once in four years – and that was Iggy Pop, who’s essentially a guest presenter. I think this age is a lot more egalitarian because of the internet, and that quality prevails a lot more, generally speaking.

Actually… I don’t think that’s true at all! I was thinking quality prevails – then I was thinking, ‘Who’s doing well at the moment?’ and I’m like, ‘No!’ Really, it depends a lot on having the industry behind you, and if it isn’t, then it’s quite difficult.

You had difficulties with your label…

The irony of the situation is that they signed us for being these avant-garde provocateurs, and then they tried to squeeze any avant-garde provocation out of us – to turn us into radio-friendly, pop-song producing boys. And if that’s what they wanted, then why did they sign us?! Either way, I’m kind of glad we went through the whole experience, because it’s forced us to be a lot better artists than we were.

POLITICS & SPIRITUAL COLLAPSE

West Of Eden has turned to be a brilliant album that captures the zeitgeist. When you started HMLTD, did you want it to be a band that would reflect what was going on culturally and politically?

Yeah, we wanted to hold a mirror to society. Not necessarily a very clear mirror, but a distorted one. From the start, though, we didn’t want to be pedagogical or didactic. I think this is where we differ from a lot of our contemporaries, like Shame or Idles – we’re not trying to tell people what to think. I mean, you could say we endorse a particular viewpoint, but we’re not forcing people into it.

I haven’t got into Shame or Idles for the same reason – they’re a bit one-dimensional. I find HMLTD to be more like Bowie: it’s about glancing blows, which can actually be more powerful.

Yeah, exactly. There’s a really good quote from I believe Alan Moore – I was reading something of his the other day. He was talking about how as an artist, you’re kind of like a window in a ceiling. And the window can look down on the square of golden light that’s fallen below and mistake that as being its own creation. Whereas really, it’s the sun and the light outside that’s creating it.

As an artist, your job is just to keep the glass clean. I thought that was a really beautiful way of expressing what the artist should do.

Living in London now, you must find that with Brexit and the attendant political tumult, there’s a dystopian tenor to the times. It’s certainly found its way onto the album.

Absolutely, but it’s not just London. Because we’re a pan-European band, all our lived experience has informed this sense of apocalypse and spiritual crisis that’s everywhere on the album. Achilles, who’s from Athens, spent his adolescence in post-crisis Greece around 2008.

They were in the same boat as us in Ireland – they called us the ‘PIIGS’ countries!

Exactly! I remember. It was the same for the French people in the band, growing up in this country where there’s just immense racial tension, massive segregation and a real social hierarchy divided along ethnic lines. And then obviously, me and James, as English citizens, have our own experiences of political tumult over the last few years.

So we’ve all brought our own experiences of the last 10 years of politics and economics to the album. But the album is not saying that things like Brexit, Trump and the rise of the far right are the crisis themselves. It’s trying to find the cause of these things, and positing them as a reaction to something larger – which I think is a much deeper spiritual crisis in the west.

Was that outlook informed by your study of philosophy?

Not really. The way that philosophy is studied in the UK, and I believe in Ireland as well, is that it’s just super-analytic, and you don’t really deal with big themes like this. It’s just a sense of how society is at the moment, which is very atomised, alienated and individuated. When I look back at the 20th century, I can see the roots of that as being the collapse of religion, and there not really being any communitarian thing to take its place.

I think the left tried to do that, and lost all its legitimacy because of the various failures of the Soviet Union and other socialist experiments. Since the ’80s, I think you’ve just had this rampant neo-liberalism, which has destroyed any sense of community and really focused everything on the individual.

Well, the crash here resulted in a situation where young people simply can’t afford to buy their own homes. Presumably you’re seeing something similar in London?

Yeah, for sure. I don’t know how anyone I know is gonna get on the property ladder. The only way you can is by becoming a banker and buying into the system that perpetuates it all. So it’s a pretty awful situation and I think the general feeling amongst my generation is one of dread and anxiety. That comes from the economic and political situation, but also from being, in a sense, slaves to the boomer generation – we go without houses and healthcare so they can have their pensions.

They’ve pursued ridiculously unsustainable policies, not to mention destroyed the environment. I think all these things combined are the real reason why my generation has this massive mental health crisis. I don’t think people can extricate that from the social conditions. This is another thing that politicians and the press are trying to do – privatise the mental health crisis. They’re trying to articulate it in terms of biology. I don’t think it’s a biological issue at all – I think it’s purely a socio-economic one.

TOURING WITH NINE INCH NAILS

You’ve supported Nine Inch Nails - I believe Trent Reznor became a fan quite early on.

He discovered us through various channels. Our manager’s brother was very close with Trent and showed him some of our stuff. Trent just loved it and said he wanted us on the tour.

Doesn’t surprise me.

Yeah, for a long time he was kind of like a mentor figure. Especially when we were on tour, he used to come into our dressing room and chat to us about the project. He’d give us career and life advice.

What did he say?

The thing that stuck with me most, which I’ve really tried to carry forward – especially because this all happened in the wake of the label experience – came on the last night. I was speaking to Trent in their dressing room and he said to me, ‘All the bad mistakes that I’ve made in my career, every single decision that I regret, were all the result of me listening to other people.’

He basically told me that, as an artist, the only way you can ever do something truly sincere, worthwhile or satisfying – that makes you feel good as an artist – is basically to do what you believe, whatever the fuck you want, even if everybody else is telling you not to do it. That’s the only way you can get any satisfaction from art. (Laughs) By completely ignoring everything else!

As you were in a difficult place career-wise, was the tour a gesture of support from him?

No, we’d secured it quite a long time before. They’d been trying to get us on tour for a while and we hadn’t been able to because of our schedule. Then I think the February of that year, we confirmed it, and it happened in October. It was really great – Trent’s amazing, a totally lovely guy, incredibly down to earth. And again, a guy who’s gone through a lot of personal struggle, artistically, psychologically and just in general in his life. It was just amazing to learn from him.

Did you ever think about asking him to maybe produce a single or EP?

Well, we’ve been trying to get him to remix a track for ages. Hopefully one day they’ll be able to, but their schedule’s always insane. They’re always writing film scores and so on, so I guess it’s not an immediate priority for them, but hopefully one day.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

What was your upbringing like?

I grew up in the countryside in Devon.

How was your school experience? I’d imagine you were quite bookish and arty.

It was pretty awful – I was a total social reject. Between the ages of 11, when I left primary school, and 16 when I left middle school and went to my sixth form college, I think I had a grand total of one real friend; one friend I ever took back to my house.

I was bookish, but more than anything I just didn’t fit in. It was an all-boys state grammar school, and again, I was just surrounded by this really horrible form of masculinity. I remember behind the sheds, there was this compost heap where there used to be thousands and thousands of snails. I remember people used to take little scissors from the art department, go to the compost heap and cut the antennae off the snails – which are their only form of sensory awareness.

Without the antennae, they’re just this frightened, suffocating pulpous mass. That sort of epitomises the form of masculinity that I felt surrounded by in an all-boys school in Devon. From that age, I realised that was something I wanted to challenge, because I don’t think it has to be like that: it’s all nurture, not nature.

The cruelty of teenage boys can be really unbelievable.

Yeah, it’s savagery.

Sometimes it borders on psychopathic.

It really does. I was particularly unlucky with my school experience, and once I got to sixth form, I met people who were a lot more like me and I made friends. I was particularly unlucky to be in this super-male environment where it was all competition, rugby and whatever. I don’t even dislike rugby, but you know how it goes. Again, teenage boys are without doubt the single most savage, cruel and brutal thing on this planet.

It doesn’t surprise me the whole conversation about toxic masculinity has become so big, because if that sort of behaviour goes unchecked through someone’s life, it can end up in a dark place.

Yeah, definitely. I feel very fortunate to have had a strong family, and also to have made friends later on, and just generally to have had a sound mental state. Through all of that, I’ve been able to cope with the challenges I had in that environment and come out relatively unscathed.

SATAN & PORNHUB

I have to ask you about ‘Satan, Luella & I’, one of the greatest songs of the last decade. It’s a quasi-political manifesto, with lines like “Not every war’s unjust / Not every faith is love”. But you end that part by singing “No orgasm is ever enough”, which is hilarious.

It is political, but “No orgasm is ever enough” is the key line. I still don’t really fully understand it. But I guess the other key lyrics are “No struggle is in vain / No system is safe”, which links to the sentiment on Blank Slate: “The world is ours / The world is a blank slate”.

We do have the ability to overturn things and change the world. That has to start with changing mindsets. That’s not trying to position ourselves as prophets in any way – we have to have humility about our role as artists. Especially alternative artists, with a very small audience at present.

But the overall message is that the world is what you make it – the current system is not how it has to be. There are other possibilities, and that’s linked to the general ethos of the project, which is all about imagination. The point is to use imagination as a radical political act.

The opening lines of the song are also striking: “We’ve been up and down these hills / And found ourselves in different pills”.

Yeah, this generation is one raised on pills of different kinds. Again, with the hills – there are peaks and troughs, and there are pills for both. There’s anti-depressants, ecstasy, pills to bring you up, pills to bring you down. So, I wanted to try and understand the landscape of this drug environment we’ve grown up in.

Finally, is it true that you premiered the video for ‘Pictures Of You’ on Pornhub?

(Laughs) We shot it like a porno, and on the YouTube version, everything’s obviously blurred out. But we had the original version on our laptops sent to us before everything was blurred, and this was at the absolute height of our conflict with our label.

As one of our protests, we uploaded the explicit version onto Pornhub. Anyway, they quickly took it down. It was only up for like 24 hours before it was removed!

• West Of Eden is out now on Lucky Number.