Closing of the Frontier: A Review of the Howlers' New Album Heavy

Words: Ollie Hopewell

Seven years after their 2019 debut, The Howlers have ended their days on the great frontier of music and settled down in a cityscape laden with bright synths, their once ambiguous sound now cemented in a structure of indie pop rock. But there looks to be cracks in the album’s foundations.

Heavy kicks off with Cold Sweat and the tonal shift is immediately obvious; gone are the thick basslines and sun-tinged guitar riffs, and it their place land a vibe that is echoey and electric. We’ve left the arid plains of What You’ve Got To Lose To Win It All and entered into a great towering modern cityscape laden with neon culture lighting up the night sky. 

It’s a similar vibe in follow up Late Nights, with frontman Adam Young delivering his words in an understated and calm fashion as Toby Richard’s drums bring the album’s pace right down. 

There looks to be a return to the emotive and fiercely debauched sound that The Howlers of old were known for in Viper, a personal favourite of the album, but the track feels like more of a one-off rather than an indicator of things to come, and LA Morning reinforces this.

As soon as we’ve picked up the pace we’ve already tapped the breaks and slowed way down, only this time the storytelling isn’t as open, and the lyrics feel very on the nose rather than allowing for any kind of interpretation. 

Heavy feels like an album of almosts, with tracks like Nightcrawling and the titular Heavy striking the right balance of emotive dread and electronic weight, but much of the tracklist feels samey and muddled. There was always going to be growing pains following the departure of bassist Guuster Braak in 2024, but maybe the East-London duo have tried to do too much too fast and somewhat overstretched; the themes of ambition and disillusion with reality are abundant across the record, but they sit in a shallow and repetitive pool that stops feeling fresh by the album’s midpoint. 

Sure, there’s a tension to the tracks, White Heat does a pretty good job of delivering on this motif, but the physicality has been almost totally lost. Much of this will come from the album being constructed remotely via several digital reworks, making the underlying sound feel far more binary than anything from the band’s back catalogue. 

There’s another reprieve in penultimate track Change My Name, the track that best hits all of the album’s themes, and the song with the most flexibility for understanding is in the soft finale Goodbye, a touching and mild tune that looks back on previously explored these such as loss and process where Young’s half-whispered lyrical delivery really shines. 

The grit from The Howlers’ early work has been blown away for a sound that is consistent, polished, and well-produced. Their new sound aligns to the broader movement of bands like The Vaccines and Blossoms shifting to the bright vibes of Las Vegas Rock à la Brandon Flowers with The Killers, and the sluggish pacing of the album separates it somewhat from this wider relocation of sound in a positive way, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.

What made The Howlers so special isn’t that they didn’t sound like anybody else, it’s that they didn’t want to be anyone else; the band’s genre fluid sound was cultivated from almost nothing by the then-trio, and it effortlessly weaved through terms like 'desert rock' and 'indie western' to create this sound that felt like it was more adjacent to the score of a modern Spaghetti Western film rather than any given established genre of music.

The Howlers allowed their listeners to be cowboys wandering about an immense and free soundscape with little guidance or direction, but this vast land has since been developed and built upon with Americanised blocks soaked in the neon synths of metropolis, the open and flowing rivers of imagination have been crossed by linear bridges of storytelling that leave little wiggle room for interpretation or impression. 

There’s a directness in message from Heavy, and it sounds interesting enough to hear in its entirety, but the message doesn't bare repeating as it somewhat lacks in substance and stimulus.