song: "Pavement" - Horror My Friend

words: Gordon Phillips

Horror My Friend is a three-piece from Adelaide, Australia releasing music on Melbourne’s Poison City Records (Camp Cope, Batpiss, TV Haze). The band’s latest single, “Pavement,” is a sonically varied, yet somehow still hypnotizing indie rock collage.  

Guitar tones shift from shimmering, streamlined cleans to absolutely blistering fuzz saws and back again without sounding disjointed or hamstringing the song’s momentum.  To the contrary, Horror My Friend masterfully induces tension and builds energy through the song’s multiple dynamic shifts, repeatedly reigning in the tempestuous rhythm section and looking to electric guitar alone to redirect the squall.  Josh Battersby’s vocals are equally versatile, thrashing through the song’s raucous passages in a genre defying snarl before reverting to a borderline spoken, conversational gait through its calms.  

If “Pavement” is a sign of things to come, Horror My Friend’s next release is sure to entice fans of all corners of the “indie rock” universe—miss it at your own risk.