In rooms where the wallpaper peels and something unseen grows underneath, The House Flies feel most at home. The Moline, Illinois quartet’s new single “Derelict Crawl,” the first taste of their forthcoming sophomore album Lions and Ore (due 6 November), is an intense, gripping exercise in patient menace that drags post-punk through damp timber, rural vacancy, and a low electrical hum before letting the guitars swell until the song feels too large for any walls that might try to contain it.
There is familiar DNA here: The Cure’s spacious ache, Joy Division’s hypnotic repetition, Bauhaus at their most severe, but the band grinds those references into something rougher and more physical. Alex Riggen’s vocal delivery arrives with a tired, almost narcotized calm, floating above the fray while Burnie Eckardt’s guitar pushes back in broad, abrasive layers. The rhythm section of Ozzie Woods and Nick Pompou understands the power of restraint: the song advances without ever rushing toward payoff, allowing repetition itself to become pressure. By the time the refrain returns, alienation has stopped being an idea and turned into a bodily condition.
Lyrically the track is rich with skin, boiled leather, curled material, needles, tea, bone, and limbs splitting at the seams. Domestic life turns strange and private; ordinary objects acquire contaminated meaning, as if someone has stayed awake too long in an old farmhouse and begun assigning motives to everything in the kitchen. The recurring sense of disconnection - “we don’t belong” is as close as the song comes to stating its centre - gives “Derelict Crawl” its ugly little heartbeat. People try to remain near one another while every image suggests contraction, damage, or the urge to slip away through the cracks.
The accompanying video keeps the mystery intact, placing the band in silhouette while strange superimposed forms slide across the frame. Its near-psychedelic treatment suits a song already obsessed with warped perception, repetition, and bodies becoming unfamiliar to themselves. Riggen has noted that the band kept returning to this track as the ideal first single: it carries some of the new record’s weight and insistence without giving too much away.
Clocking in at a deliberate 4:35, “Derelict Crawl” shows how much threat can live inside patience. The House Flies stretch their post-punk foundation toward shoegaze density and gothic austerity, leaving just enough empty space for every guitar surge to feel earned. Limited black vinyl copies of Lions and Ore will soon exist; on the evidence of this single they may carry one of the more impressively diseased little documents of Midwestern isolation released this year.
The House Flies are not merely echoing the past. They are letting it crawl, slowly and deliberately, into the present.
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