Moline, Illinois outfit The House Flies return with Lions and Ore, a seven-track collection that deepens their post-punk and gothic-rock sound with atmospheric arrangements, brooding guitar work and an intriguing sense of intimacy. Drawing comparisons to The Cure, Joy Division, Interpol and Bauhaus, the band creates music steeped in nocturnal melancholy, warmth and melodic appeal beneath its darker exterior. The album also marks the first full-length appearance of second guitarist Burnie Eckhardt alongside vocalist and guitarist Alex Riggen, bassist Ozzie Woods and drummer Nick Pompou, giving the band’s arrangements another dimension to explore.
“Goodnight, Goodnight, Lover Dear” opens with a steady, thumping rhythm and sharply crashing cymbals, while warm, moody guitars establish a melodic foundation. Riggen’s high, delicate voice has an intriguing fragility as he sings slowly, gradually drawing the song into its atmosphere. As it develops, his delivery tightens, and the guitars grow fuzzier, more forceful and driven. The lyrics weave together religious imagery, domestic details, intimacy and exhaustion, creating a strange, dreamlike portrait of affection and disillusionment.
“Lost Literature” brings a sharper, more immediate post-punk pulse. The beat is tighter, the music glimmers and echoes into the surrounding space, and Riggen adopts a more pointed, almost smug vocal delivery. Its images of late-night highways, car radios and fragments of abandoned writing give the song a restless, nostalgic quality, as though the narrator is trying to recover something that has already slipped away.
“Derelict Crawl” shifts towards the heavier side of the record, built around repetition and a more direct guitar-driven intensity. Its recurring declaration, “We don’t belong,” gives the track a defiant centre, while the lyrics’ strange images of summer, leather and bodies shrinking and slipping through cracks add to its unsettling character. “Snakes and Toads” takes a slower, more devotional turn. It brings together religious language, animal imagery and expressions of physical closeness, making love feel simultaneously comforting and unsettling.
“Count Us Down” provides a hypnotic centre for the second half, using streetlights, weather and the passing of time to create a hazy late-night scene. Its recurring questions and references to sleep give the track a drifting suspension. “Shelter Me” turns towards harsher imagery, with desert heat, dry skin, old photographs and enclosed spaces suggesting a relationship or environment that has become increasingly suffocating. Yet even here, the possibility of starting over remains in the background.
The closing track, “The Glass, The Orchard,” offers a particularly tender farewell. Riggen sings softly and slowly over warm instrumentation and rumbling beats, his delivery more vulnerable and touching than elsewhere on the record. Its lyrics dwell on remembered gestures, familiar rooms, old photographs, and the comforting details of shared life.
Recorded in Alex Riggen’s basement, Lions and Ore feels like a collection of interconnected nocturnal scenes rather than a straightforward narrative. The House Flies balance the rougher edges of post-punk and gothic rock with melodic warmth and quieter moments of tenderness that make this a compelling and atmospheric second album.
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Review by: Naomi Joan