From the opening bars, the rhythm section of Ozzie Woods and Nick Pompou locks into a driving, insistent pulse that never lets up its grip, while Burnie Eckhardt’s guitar work coils around Alex Riggen’s like barbed wire around a fencepost. The production, courtesy of Ross Mixes and mastering engineer Michael Briggs, keeps the mix lean and mean: nothing here is polished to the point of losing its grit.<\/p>
Riggen’s lyrics are where the song earns its teeth. Dial tones, worn leather, summer heat, physical collapse \u2014 the imagery reads like a fever dream stitched together from an Illinois summer gone rancid, and the repeated refrain “we don’t belong” becomes less a lament than a mantra, chanted until it stops sounding like self-pity and starts sounding like a threat. Riggen has spoken about wanting this single to carry the record’s weight without giving away its secrets, and that restraint shows: the song feels like a held breath, a door left ajar rather than kicked open.<\/p> The accompanying video extends that same rural gothic language into something visual. Sepia tones and dust-caked figures \u2014 echoes of the sooty, lantern-lit miners on the single’s artwork \u2014 turn the track into a kind of folk horror without a single jump scare. The camera lingers on textures: cracked hands, peeling paint, the particular exhaustion of bodies that have worked too long in heat that refuses to break. It is a video that trusts atmosphere over spectacle, letting the song’s tension do the heavy lifting while the images simply confirm what the ears already suspect \u2014 that something underneath this band’s Midwestern calm is coming apart at the seams.<\/span><\/p> What separates “Derelict Crawl” from the glut of post-punk revivalists currently crowding streaming playlists is its refusal to lean on irony. The House Flies play this material straight-faced, mining genuine dread rather than winking at genre tropes, and the effect lands with considerably more force for it. Comparisons to Joy Division’s rhythmic austerity or The Chameleons’ widescreen gloom will be inevitable, and not unwarranted, but the band’s own fingerprints \u2014 that rural, agricultural sense of decay, the sweat and heat of a Midwestern summer rather than a rain-slicked Manchester street \u2014 keep the song from feeling like tribute.<\/span><\/p> If “Derelict Crawl” is the appetiser, *Lions and Ore* promises a fuller, more patient meal: seven tracks reportedly built around slower dynamic shifts and the same rural gothic imagery stretched across a wider canvas. On this evidence, the wait until November will be worth it. The House Flies have delivered a single that rewards repeat listens, unearthing new details \u2014 a buried guitar line, a shift in Riggen’s phrasing \u2014 each time through. Few bands manage to sound both hungry and assured this early into a record cycle. The House Flies do both at once, and the results crawl under the skin exactly as the title promises.<\/span><\/p> **Verdict:** A confident, atmospheric first single that trades easy hooks for slow-burning dread \u2014 and comes out ahead for it.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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