Primary Colours is the second studio album by English rock band The Horrors. It was first released as a livestream on the NME website on 27 April 2009, and received a wide release a week later.

Background

The album was produced by Geoff Barrow of Portishead, Craig Silvey and music video director Chris Cunningham. Recording took place in Bath during the summer of 2008. The band signed to XL Recordings after they left Loog Records in 2007. Regarding their time in the studio, band member Rhys Webb commented: "We had such an amazing time working on it, writing it and getting lost in it... we'd wander into the studio, and then never want to leave". Webb and Tom Cowan, who had joined the band as keyboardist and bass guitarist respectively, switched instruments from this album onwards. Prior to the album's release, the band released a cover of Suicide's "Shadazz" on a split single released by Blast First Petite as part of their tribute to Alan Vega in October 2008. On 17 March 2009, the eight-minute music video for "Sea Within a Sea", directed by former Jesus and Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart, was posted on the band's website. The song was released as a digital download-only single, and full details of Primary Colours also surfaced. In a preview article, music journalist Mike Diver commented that the album was "set to be one of the year's best" and that it was "wholly worth all the hype that's attracted to its unexpected brilliance."

Release

Primary Colours was released by XL on 4 May 2009, with a livestream on the NME website a week prior. The album charted on the UK Albums Chart at No. 25. Following the album's release, the single "Who Can Say" was released on 7" vinyl. In 2009, it was awarded a silver certification from the Independent Music Companies Association, which indicated sales of at least 30,000 copies throughout Europe.

Reception

According to review aggregator website Metacritic, the record was met with "universal critical acclaim", receiving a normalised score of 82% based on 19 reviews. On 21 July 2009, the album was announced as one of the twelve albums shortlisted for the year's Mercury Prize award, but it ultimately lost to Speech Debelle's album Speech Therapy. Fact said that the album struck "a rich vein of brawny but windswept psychedelic rock" and BBC Music positively compared the album to the work of My Bloody Valentine, Loop and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. Pitchfork emphasized the band's change in style, noting their "shoegazer makeover" and concluding that the album succeeded in "transforming gothic gloom into psychedelic drone". Retrospectively calling the album "the triple point where goth, post-punk, and shoegaze met", AllMusic concluded: "As bold and listenable as it is, Primary Colours is occasionally scattered, giving the impression that the band is trying on different sounds for size -- although the fact that most of it works so well is actually more surprising than how different it is from their earlier work".

Accolades

Legacy

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the album's release, The Horrors played the album in full at a one-off show at The Royal Albert Hall on 9 May 2019. In a retrospective 2019 article about the album, Loud and Quiet argued "this exploratory, psychedelic record... would act as an antiseptic to the post-Libertines landfill still dominant in 2009. Its role in ushering in a British psych revival has been under acknowledged, too."

Track listing

All songs written and arranged by the Horrors. Japan-only bonus tracks:

Personnel

Charts