Van Houten - ‘Never Did Come Back’
Leeds six-piece Van Houten delve into deep alternative vulnerability with punchy, distorted single ‘Never Did Come Back’ ahead of new album ‘The Tallest Room’, due March 2024
Van Houten’s most recent offerings mark an altogether different trajectory for the Leeds-based alternative shoegazers. My own previous encounters with the band, which include their 2019 self-titled album and string of singles thereafter, signified to me a sound wholly removed from the subject of this review, albeit with a distinctiveness all their own. Make no mistake, Van Houten’s contributions mark them out as a truly unique and exciting Leeds export. Their self-titled album is a blissful concoction of Mac DeMarco’s seminal reinterpretations of indie guitar music, with a kind of swirling, occasionally distorted guitar ambience reminiscent of early Pale Saints and Souvlaki-era Slowdive, welded neatly together with a tasteful sense of hook and melody. Throw in frontman Louis Sadler’s brooding, sensitive vocal contributions, and what you have is a band and album with a fully realised sound, energy and vision.
That Van Houten have emerged out of a long absence in music releases with ‘Coming Of Age’ and ‘Never Did Come Back’ should signify the new realm they’re currently entrenched in. The former track I determined as something of a midpoint between their self-titled album and the new sonic territories they’re fully engaging in now. The track’s verses harken back to that Mac DeMarco quintessence they seemed to take inspiration from in their debut album, but it’s the tracks choruses, awash in a swirling distortion and spiraling guitar reverberation, that thrust the track into an edgier, grungier final product.
With the latter track, and the subject of this review, you find the band having taken a full leap into a moodier, darker territory, the kind of move that on first listening totally surprised me. It’s arguably the track farthest removed from any of the other material they’ve created and released. Tribal, steady, thudding drumbeats together with droning bass line ground the track, allowing the dissonant, angular guitar melodies and countermelodies to construct its tone and feeling. It's one of foreboding, dreariness, and darkness. The guitars, reminiscent of nineties grunge outfit Failure, blend and clash as their respective melodies dance and fight around the low-end thud and march, occasionally retextured by additional looming, fuzzed out feedback synth line that creep in and out of the mix like an ominous foreshadowing. Sadler’s warm, brooding vocals are changed here. The tenderness found in the debut album remains, now tinged with a lonely sadness that moves in lockstep with the dreary instrumentation. Sadler conceived of the track as an homage to mental health issues, of which he himself had been battling. He describes the soul of the track as fundamentally a recognition of these mental battles, a cathartic acknowledgement of them, and to ultimately emerge out of the conflict a changed person. This movement into changed territory is encapsulated by the track itself, with its foreboding motion only slightly varied in the chorus, the guitar melodies now more overdriven and dissonant, the feedback now swirling a touch more ominously, and the drums inching ever closer to liveliness. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tracks’ steadiness and simple, melancholy instrumentation comprised its total runtime, but it's the final minute of this four-minute track where Van Houten offers up something else entirely. A small refrain comes after the final chorus, with only bare synth and near inaudible guitar line bleeding through, before the track explodes into full, cacophonous distortion, a swirling and dense wall of sound right out of My Bloody Valentines ‘Loveless’. A lead guitar swirls and sours above the mix, the kind of Kevin Shields offering now so revered in alternative music, and synth pulsates around the noise, before all but that shimmering synth cuts out to close out the track. An altogether incredible closer.
It seems Van Houten are engaged in something of a sonic experimentation that will separate them from their earlier works. Sadler has described ‘Never Did Come Back’ as likely his favourite track he’s ever written. If that’s anything to go by, I can only be excited for the material they’re due to release in the coming months. Van Houten are due to release next album ‘The Tallest Room’ on March 22nd 2024, so be sure to keep the date in mind.
Words by Harry Meenagh
