Live at Village Underground in London: Hmltd

Devoted disciples of Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘total artwork’), Fangs is the band’s latest exercise in expansive world-building; a practice they have perfected over their near-decade in London’s underground music scene. Their uncompromising live shows have achieved cult status for going far beyond the boundaries of an ordinary gig, harnessing elaborate set design, costume, actors and performance artists to create immersive, multi-sensory, participatory live experiences that blur the boundary between audience and artist. For their 2022 show at Heaven, the band interrogated freedom and authority; building a ‘fictional totalitarian state’ called ‘The Order’ inside the venue, complete with unique alternative identities for every audience member, and an alternate reality game based on the Stanford Prison Experiment in which the audience had to work together to overthrow The Order.

According to singer Henry Spychalski, these avant-garde and otherworldly experiments serve a wider point: “Imagination is a radical political and spiritual act” he says, “through imagining other worlds, you draw attention to the contingency of your own and unveil it for what it truly is: imagined. To imagine is to dream another world, and the first step to creating one.” The world crafted in Fangs is a thoroughly gothic one - teeming with glowing horror, imperceptible evil, digital dismemberment, ancient curses and ruined castles… vampires! As Spychalski explains, “we no longer understand the systems we have built - from AGI to the vast abstractions of global capital. And so, it is time to resurrect the ghosts that modernity attempted to bury: plague pits, witches, vampires, as a way of mapping a new demonology and so plotting a resistance. Fangs is our call for A Gothic Insurrection.”