There is something sensual, dark and slightly grubby in The House Flies’ current sound, the sort of post-punk that could have slipped out of a back-room club in Paris or a roadside bar somewhere in Texas after dark. Then you check the address and end up in Moline, Illinois. On “Derelict Crawl“, Ozzie Woods’ bass and Nick Pompou’s drums keep a steady pulse, the guitar carries a light twang through the quieter sections, and the chorus fills with distortion as Alex Riggen keeps returning to “We don’t belong”. It is dark music with enough movement underneath to pull you into a pretty strange dance.
By the time Alex knew what kept turning up across The House Flies’ second album, the seven songs were already done. Fields, old houses, heat, weather, churches, domestic objects, things disappearing. He started seeing the repetitions while typing all the lyrics for the vinyl packaging and looking through them again as the band tried to settle on a title and artwork.
“Usually the music comes first. Every song starts with some kind of guitar or bass part, and even playing that one thing over and over starts to suggest a place or atmosphere to me,” Alex said.
That first part can change considerably once everybody gets hold of it. Drums arrive, another guitar pushes elsewhere, a transition opens a section Alex did not have in mind when he started. The words come later, gradually collecting images and a loose story around whatever the music has suggested. He does plenty of editing afterwards, sometimes because a word no longer sounds right, sometimes because the vocal melody has changed and the syllables simply do not fit.
There is no private list of symbols he keeps trying to plant in the songs. There was no recurring image he consciously tried to cut from “Lions and Ore” only to watch it keep coming back. The repetitions became visible later.
“I don’t think I really noticed how often those things were appearing until the record was finished and we were trying to come up with the title and artwork. I also typed out all of the lyrics for the vinyl packaging around that time, and seeing them all together made some of those recurring images much more obvious.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
Illinois had been sitting in his head for years anyway. Alex grew up in a smaller town north of Moline and spent a lot of time around fields and timber, old farms and barns. Two other members still live around that area. Alex has been in the Quad Cities for roughly six years, close to the bigger concentration of music around Moline, Davenport and Rock Island.
Those places enter the lyrics through memory. The band never sat down and agreed that “Lions and Ore” should become some carefully designed piece of Midwest gothic. Alex had already seen those fields, buildings and stretches of rural Illinois enough times for them to turn up when he started writing.
Old photographs are part of the same habit. He can pick up a picture of strangers in an antique shop or thrift store and immediately start wondering who they were, what happened just before the shutter clicked, where they went afterwards and how the photograph ended up loose in somebody else’s hands decades later.
Abandoned houses work on him in much the same way.
“You look at a room or a house that’s falling apart and know that at one point it was just somebody’s normal everyday life.”
Once the finished lyrics were sitting together, ordinary rooms and objects kept appearing alongside people and places changing or disappearing. “Goodnight, Goodnight, Lover Dear” has hymnals and chapel bells alongside an unmade bed and cotton sheets. “Snakes and Toads” moves through worship, silence, mud and animal images. “Count Us Down” returns to streetlights, grass, heat, weather and sleep. “Shelter Me” brings in dry heat, tar, saws, old wire, old photographs and enclosed spaces.
Alex had seen something similar happen in his solo work. His Wilhelm album “Wake Me in the Sunrise” ended up carrying plenty of rural and domestic images too, even though the music around them is very different.
Some of the church language on “Lions and Ore” arrived once individual songs started suggesting a hot, humid rural setting and older church traditions. A small country church on Sunday morning made sense there. So did strong faith and fire-and-brimstone language.
Alex is also interested in how close religion can sit to ordinary hardship in small communities, where church and belief may be what gets somebody through a rough part of their life. The members of The House Flies have different backgrounds and beliefs, and he leaves the language open enough for listeners to recognise whatever part of it belongs to their own experience.
“Lost Literature“, due as the second single on October 2, gives one of these half-formed stories a particularly clear physical place. Alex pictured night in a small Illinois town. Two people who know each other extremely well are sitting somewhere familiar. They do not need to keep talking. Underneath that comfort is the urge to get away, with no real answer yet for where they should go.
Then the chorus puts them in a car.
“You haven’t really disappeared, but for a little while you’ve stepped outside whatever your normal life is.”
The road has no major destination attached to it. They get on the highway and drive. For a day, maybe only a few hours, normal life is somewhere else.
“Derelict Crawl” works with a rougher set of pictures. Dial tones, shrinking leather, stained bone, tea, farmer’s mist, spring being sewn down, bodies slipping through cracks. The words do not settle into a straight story. “We don’t belong” comes back again and again while the band shift between the clipped rhythm of the verse and thicker guitar sections around the chorus. The single and its video came out September 4, the first public piece from “Lions and Ore”. The full record arrives November 6.
The biggest transformation happened with the final track.
The opening guitar part of “The Glass, The Orchard” had been sitting around on Alex’s acoustic guitar for a while. He expected it to become a roughly four-minute folk song for Wilhelm. Near the end of the “Lions and Ore” sessions, with most of the album already finished, he picked it up again and brought it into The House Flies.
“I never would have imagined the finished song from that original guitar part. And if I had written the lyrics back when I thought it was a Wilhelm song, I’m sure the images and tone would have been completely different too.”
Nick independently picked the same song when talking about the biggest surprise on the album. Alex’s first idea gave him little warning of where the full band would eventually take it, especially during the build-up at the end.
Alex and Nick have had plenty of time to develop those instincts. They have played together since Murnau, founded in 2006. Nearly twenty years later, some parts of a song can happen with almost no discussion.
“Haha we definitely have come a long way since 2006. Nowadays the chemistry for build ups and quiet parts are so natural that it just happens without any communication!”
They still talk through the basic structure when they need to. When do the drums enter? Who starts the song? Where does a section change? Once Alex brings in an idea, Nick’s first move is usually to listen and work out what his drums can add to the direction already sitting there.
That old shorthand now has Burnie Eckhardt and Ozzie Woods pushing it in directions Alex and Nick would not necessarily reach alone.
The House Flies began with the four-track “Glimmer” EP on January 17, 2023. “Mannequin Deposit” followed on July 2, 2024, with eight tracks recorded in a basement in Moline and pressed on limited opaque pink vinyl.
“Sweet Foxhound” arrived in September 2025 and became Burnie’s first recorded appearance with the band.
On “Mannequin Deposit“, The House Flies were still recording as a three-piece and Alex wrote both guitar parts himself. The problem became obvious onstage. He could only play one of them, so every show involved choosing which recorded part mattered most. Something from the album version always disappeared.
Burnie had already joined them live after that record. By “Sweet Foxhound” he was on a recording. “Lions and Ore” is the first full album where the second guitar belongs entirely to another player.
“I really like that I’m not deciding what both guitars are supposed to do anymore. Burnie develops and records his own parts, and that gives the songs another perspective that I wouldn’t naturally come up with myself.”
Alex still has his guitar. Burnie hears another one.
“That’s probably the biggest difference on Lions and Ore. It genuinely sounds like four different people contributing to the finished song rather than me writing two guitar parts and everybody else building around them. The record is better because of that.”
Nick hears the change from the rhythm section too. Having Burnie and Ozzie involved throughout the writing made him and Alex look at songs differently and gave pieces such as “The Glass, The Orchard” room to end up somewhere none of them expected from the opening idea.
That closing track also supplied the album title. One line reads, “How your touch calmed lions and ore.”
Alex did not have a fixed definition when he wrote it. The words gave him two very different physical things: something alive, strong and potentially dangerous, and something heavy, buried and still. The person in the lyric could quiet both.
Months later, with the songs done and the band going back through the lyrics for possible titles, that phrase kept surviving.
“It seemed to fit a lot of the contrasts that had ended up on the record without describing any one song too literally. There are quiet parts next to very heavy ones, ordinary domestic images next to harsher ones, and a lot of things that feel alive alongside things that feel old, fixed or slowly disappearing.”
The title came after all of it. So did Alex’s recognition of the fields, heat, rooms, old photographs and church language that had kept finding their way back.
“Lions and Ore” will be released digitally, through Bandcamp and streaming platforms, plus a run of 100 copies on 12-inch black vinyl. Ross Mixes handled mixing, Michael Briggs mastered it, Alex did the artwork and design, and Wilhelm & Sons Entertainment Company are releasing the record. The current lineup is Alex Riggen on vocals and guitars, Burnie Eckhardt on guitar, Ozzie Woods on bass and Nick Pompou on drums.
November 6 also brings the album release show at Raccoon Motel in Davenport, Iowa, with King of the Weirdos, Company Dimes and Half Loves. “Shelter Me” and “Goodnight, Goodnight, Lover Dear” are planned to stay in rotation as post-release focus tracks afterwards.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
