False Heads return with the scintillating and spooky new single: “Haunted Houses”, featuring Frank Turner.
Featuring punk icon Frank Turner on guitar and vocals, the eerie new track comes as another glimpse into rising rock trio False Heads’ long-awaited second album ‘Sick Moon’.
Sure to send a shudder down your spine and enough to have you peeking behind your curtains, new single “Haunted Houses” arrives as a booming indie-inspired anthem with a barbed and fuzzy underbelly. Overflowing with frenetic layers of noise and spooky, seesawing instrumentals, it’s a track that ramps up the anxiety with an unchained and anthemic velocity.
A track that’s ultimately about those horrors that lurk in plain sight, as opposed to anything too otherworldly, frontman Luke Griffiths explains of the song:
“”Haunted Houses” is about living with your own mental health problems and all the different versions of yourself that you have to cohabit with, only to then have to deal with the rest of the world too. I don’t believe in the supernatural and there is definitely no god. Yet most of our species focus on religion or the supernatural because they can’t deal with themselves.”
“But I think you watch the show of your life in the front row seats. You’re born into a Haunted House and you live with the ghosts of your own life.”
With chugging guitars that rumble like a ghost train running off its tracks, riffs that shudder like a broken floorboard under foot and soaring hooks that wouldn’t be out of place in the opening moments of a horror film, the prickly new track builds to an explosive punk-tinged climax. A jagged fourth sample of False Heads’ forthcoming second album, it arrives hot on the heels of earlier singles “Thick Skin”, “Day Glow” and “Mime The End”.
Inspired by the feeling that “the external world often seems to parallel and affect your internal struggles”, False Heads’ new album ‘Sick Moon’ was born partly out of frontman Luke’s frustration at the music industry over the past few years. “Rock and pop music have become an endeavour for kids from super-rich families, or with parents already in the industry,” he says.
A record that grapples with these bigger ideas, as well as Luke’s own personal battles, the vocalist adds of the album:
“The album is just a pure expression of everything I’ve felt and feel. It’s pure rage, isolation, and alienation, yet also sarcastic and hopefully sprinkled with a bit of humour. It’s a stream of consciousness I used to deal with my struggles with depression, insomnia, anxiety, and issues with substance abuse.”
Produced by Frank Turner at his home studio — and with its first single unveiled just weeks after Turner’s own record ‘FTHC’ landed the UK Number One spot — the ten-track LP ‘Sick Moon’ arrives this September and also features collaborations from the artist, such as on current single “Haunted Houses”.
Having taken the UK by storm after their formation in 2015, the Essex outfit have gained an incendiary live reputation after playing with the likes of The Libertines, Josh Homme and Band of Skulls. With the legendary Iggy Pop going so far as to endorse the band as “young, talented and going places”, they have also attracted the attention of Clash Magazine, The Line of Best Fit, Louder Than War and DSCVRD Magazine, with Gigwise praising recent single “Thick Skin” as “fuelled by punk rage and instant-classic riffs, [setting] the tone for the rest of the forthcoming album.”
Gaining airplay across the UK and beyond from a range of tastemaker names including BBC Radio 6, BBC Introducing, talkSport Radio, Amazing Radio, Jack Saunders on BBC Radio 1, KINK in the Netherlands and Inter FM in Japan, False Heads have also gained placements on Apple Music’s ‘New in Rock’, Spotify’s ‘All New Rock’ and Amazon Music’s ‘Best New Bands’ playlists.
With ‘Sick Moon’ set for release this September, the band will also be heading out on their most extensive UK and European tour to date from October 2022. Full dates and details can be found here.