Album Review: Horror by Bartees Strange

Horror, the third full length from Bartees Strange, is a collection of songs that encapsulate what fear means and how it can be processed. Sonically, it's extremely varied, but not at all to its detriment. There's acoustic, easy-listening instrumentals in Baltimore that explore a yearning to settle down, and songs like the up-tempo Lovers that juxtapose this with deep house beats as he laments about being 'too fucked up', while tracks like Hit It Quit It and Norf Gun have strong funk and hip-hop influences, showing that Strange is able to expertly weave between genres with finesse and style.

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What is it that binds people so tightly to horror? While a good chunk of the general population opt to avoid the full-body exhilaration of scary movies and stories, some of us are magnetized towards it. In 2024, for instance, queer communities filled cinemas to watch the body-horror melodrama of Coralie Fargeat's The Substance and the tense, crushing angst of Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow. There's the element of colorful camp that horror films exhibit, which is of course a draw, but what of the actual text of the movies? Bartees Strange's third album, Horror, posits an answer: for plenty of marginalized people, the world itself is a horror movie, and embracing gore and fear, taking ownership of it to defeat it, is as good a defense as any.

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But you've heard that before. What makes this album interesting is the shifting, shared, duelling perspectives from hunter to hunted. Strange's last records were already scary; he's no stranger to off-kilter beats and chord progressions ("Cosigns", "Flagey God"). This album lets the fear into the thematic aspects as well, exploring uncertainty in love, in career, in physical safety as a black person in rural America.

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Bartees Strange’s ascent has been a joy to behold. His seamless blend of rock, soul, funk, and hip-hop, with a confessional singer-songwriter’s words, puts him in a class of his own. While others try, no one is as skilled at blending so many different sounds into a cohesive whole right now, and it all rests on his compelling vocals. He is as powerful crooning as he is spitting bars.

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Bartees Strange is galvanized. The English-American, born in Ipswich, bred in Oklahoma and now based in Washington D.C – partially explaining the singer-songwriter's multi-genre approach to song craft – proves more polished than ever on new album, 'Horror'. Replete with Sting-style riffs and songwriting confronting the realities of a brutal world, ‘Horror' teems with angst, gore, melodrama and retribution.

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