I’ll just be blunt: I’ve absolutely hated HMLTD’s previous work. Somewhere in between all of the glam and the punk, they’d forgotten about the actual music itself, and 2018’s generally panned EP Hate Music Last Time Delete was some of the most atrociously handled rock music I’d had the unfortunate opportunity to subject myself to. I didn’t even want to write about it; I just wanted to forget it had happened.
The rollout for West of Eden wasn’t so encouraging either: NME and Quietus articles mostly featured various HMLTDs whining about being cancelled over queerbaiting (a cursory search for “HMLTD” and “cancelled” on Twitter reveals nothing) and being a once-hyped band, dead in the water by anyone’s fault but their own. I found it insufferable. So I went into this record expecting to write something cursory and dismissive, making fun of this specifically London-brand of failed post-punk revival. About two songs in, I realized two things at the same time: (1) this was a good album and (2) damn, I would actually have to write a thorough piece about it.
The title track and opener immediately arrests you with some uncharacteristically great lyrics, featuring frontman Henry Chisholm starkly soothsaying the visage of “two drowned dogs float[ing] belly side up […] two girls spin around a mobius strip club.” Their message of the titular West being dead, though interesting, doesn’t develop into much besides a bombastic mission statement, though it does manage to carry the A-side through to to completion. The next truly interesting cut off of the record is 2016’s bizarre single “To The Door.” Though insane enough to pull off the cowboy trap phenomenon before Lil Nas X had even deleted his Nicki Minaj stan account, it feels completely at home in between cowpunk ditty “The Ballad of Calamity Jones” and punk blues epic “Satan, Luella, & I.” The record feels, strangely enough, as evocative of Country Teasers as Travis Scott. I don’t consider myself much of a hip hop head, but trap moments on this track are genuinely excellent, though I see how it would be alienating to older listeners. With all the eclectic mishmash of frankly insane genres all across this generally guitar-based record, this could certainly be described as post-punk for generation Z, though I don’t know why you’d want to do that. Instead, I invite the reader to explore the successes and failures of their art punk contemporaries.This, perhaps, is why fellow London provocateurs like Warmduscher and Fat White Family stand out among dreary punk peers like Mush and Gonzo. Instead of treading the same tired lines of plucky, angular guitar music, they’re incorporating every type of genre they encounter (one recalls house, alternative dance, acid rock, dream pop…). It becomes a genuinely interesting, modernized effort, even if they
And don’t get me wrong: the record does not pull it off the whole way through. The lyrics are still devastatingly juvenile— “Satan, Luella, & I” has all the subtlety of a high school sophomore who just figured out what centrism is, or Matty Healy, or both— and the narrative pair of “Joanna” and “Where’s Joanna?” verges on Bret Easton Ellis levels of oblivious un-irony. Yes, this is an incredibly pompous band, composed of upper middle class kids taking themselves way too seriously. But for all that, West of Eden is still a hell of a lot of genre-bending fun. —Eight.
