Primary Colours

The Artist

The Horrors are a five-piece band from Southend-on-Sea, England, who emerged in the mid-2000s as part of a loose wave of British acts channeling post-punk's angular energy and gothic atmosphere. Led by the towering, sharp-featured Faris Badwan, they initially made their name on a diet of distorted garage rock and B-movie menace, drawing comparisons to The Cramps and early Birthday Party. What made them genuinely interesting was their refusal to stay still — they evolved rapidly and dramatically, shedding the shock-rock surface to reveal a band with deep, eclectic roots and serious ambitions. Primary Colours arrived as their second album and functioned as a near-total reinvention, cementing them as one of the most compelling British acts of their generation.

The Album

Recorded largely in isolation at a farmhouse in rural England and produced by Geoff Barrow and Chris Goss — two figures with deep ties to alternative and psychedelic rock — Primary Colours was released in May 2009 on XL Recordings. The remote recording environment is audible in the album's cavernous, expansive sound, which replaced the band's debut scrappiness with vast layers of synthesizer, motorik rhythm, and shoegazing guitar texture. Barrow's influence in particular drew the sessions toward the kind of kosmische-inflected density associated with My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized, while Goss brought a muscular, desert-rock weight to the low end. Thematically, the album circles around alienation, dissolution, and a kind of bleak transcendence — emotions rendered not through lyrical directness but through texture and atmosphere.

Listen For

The synth architecture. Keyboardist Tom Furse builds dense, droning layers that function less as melody than as weather — pay attention to how the keyboards on "Sea Within a Sea" create a slow pressure that builds for several minutes before anything shifts.

Rhys Webb's bass. The bass playing throughout is surprisingly melodic and forward in the mix — on "Do You Remember" it acts almost as a lead instrument, carrying emotional weight that the vocals deliberately withhold.

Long-form dynamics. Several tracks here refuse conventional song structure in favor of gradual, almost tectonic shifts in intensity. Notice how the album rewards patience, with payoffs arriving late and feeling genuinely earned rather than engineered.

Faris Badwan's vocal restraint. Badwan pitches his voice low and detached, often burying it beneath the instrumentation — on "Who Can Say" this creates a haunting distance, as though the singer is observing events rather than living them.

Themes of drift and disconnection. The album returns repeatedly to states of passivity and disorientation — "I Only Think of You" and "New Ice Age" present relationships and selfhood as things slipping out of reach rather than actively lost.