Review: LVCRFT throws a spooky, scary soiree with ‘V’

LVCRFT rules Halloween. There’s just no one making the kind of horror-pop music that sends chills galloping down your spine and gets your body throbbing on the dance floor. The market is still largely untapped (wtf is up with that?!), and the collective knows that. That’s why they’ve made it a yearly ritual to release new music. In the year of our lord and savior 2023, LVCRFT continues to haunt with their latest record, the spooky 12-piece simply titled V. It’s a big, bad, and bold set that follows Skeleton Sam and his voyage to find his one true love, Seraphina.

The creative geniuses — songwriters Evan Bogart and Amanda Warner, as well as producer Peter Wade, among other collaborators — electrify in the way they carve out pop hooks with brutally ferocious intensity, their musical adeptness not unlike a butcher knife’s glistening edge. Playful rhythms pound the eardrums, as evidenced by such essentials as “Late Night Rider,” complete with melodic organ coursing in its backbone. “Feeling Like Halloween” bobbles to and fro, a hypnotic grind swirling in the arrangement, as the vocals slither over the melody like 10,000 pythons in the mud.

Where “Everyday is Halloween” grooves hard into the pavement with a smokiness casting a purple glow, “Bad Witches” jingles and jangles with a buoyant lightness. Such moments balance each other out, yet there are musical connective tissues holding the record together, some sort of twisted flipbook with grotesque images and bloody lyrics. “Purgatory” purrs and whines, featuring spoken word sections to boost the story with some necessary narrative. LVCRFT flexes impressive fluidity in their work, marked with luminescent and weird structures that still adhere to traditional pop frameworks.

“Scream! (For Halloween)” echos with a grandfather clock’s nightmarish chimes and primes the listener for the album’s most addicting moment. It’s freakishly intoxicating, and the melody is downright entrancing, doused in, yes you guessed it, plenty of screams. “Turn to the left and give us a shriek / Throw your claws in the air like you’re a spooky freak,” sings The Remains, a tortured vocal delivered barely above a whisper. A saxophone dips into the arrangement to give the song a wonderfully stylish ambiance, perfect for the shuddering crisp in the air.

LVCRFT can’t be stopped, and why would you want them to? Their music is so gripping and deeply fascinating, that it’s almost deadly. V is the latest in a long string of records, including the equally-perfect The Sequel from 2020, that make Halloween that much creepier. There are few artists working on this level, and the mysterious collective is (hopefully) just getting started. Cheers to many more years of eerie, alluring pop music.

To accompany the record drop, the group is issuing a 20-part found footage flick (as a video series) on their socials. You don’t want to miss it.

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