The latest album by Hercules & Love Affair kicks off with a brisk ditty about death and oblivion. “On one uncertain day/You will have to go,” goes the opening verse of Grace, a rumbling banger that upgrades the group’s glittering disco sound with nods towards 1980s goth institutions such as Dead Can Dance and The Cure. The line came to Hercules & Love Affair leader Andy Butler as he reflected on his history of substance abuse and the brushes with mortality that followed. He has gazed into the void more than once.
“You fly very close to the flame. My wings were singed for sure,” he says, explaining that his self-destructiveness flowed from a lack of self-esteem going back to an unhappy upbringing in suburban Denver. “I didn’t have a sense ever that I was allowed to feel okay.”
There were many dark days on the road to salvation, says Butler, speaking ahead of the June 17th release of In Amber, Hercules & Love Affair’s fifth LP and their first in five years. As a gay kid raised in what he has described as “a violent household without any role models”, drugs and alcohol helped numb the pain of being different. And though he later cleaned up, he fell off the wagon quite spectacularly when his music career took off, the prescription tranquilliser Xanax becoming his chemical comfort blanket of choice.
“That’s the hole in the soul,” he says. “People fill that with relationships. Or with drink or drugs.”
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For Butler, the path to death’s door was paved with good intentions. Overworked and frazzled by anxieties, he turned to Xanax as a coping mechanism. But coping spiralled into addiction and he began mixing pills with alcohol and various uppers and downers. More than once while touring, he would wake in a A&E room, attached to a heart monitor, wondering how the hell he had got there.
“When you put out music and you see some amount of positive reception and people start inviting you around the world — and you have all of these management agents around you wanting you to go, go, go — your humanity can be zapped. I don’t want to be like Judy Garland, carted up on stage medicated enough so that I can do a little song and dance and then be taken off again.”
Hercules & Love Affair grew out of Butler’s first smash, Blind. A rococo floor-filler that went top 40 in the UK in 2007, it wove his love of house music and disco into weird and wonky shapes. He had imagined it as a one-hit wonder — but such was its impact he decided to turn Hercules & Love Affair (named after his passion for Greek mythology) into a full-time project.
Blind had also featured a lead vocal from his friend Anohni, back when she went as Antony of Mercury Music Prize-winners Antony and the Johnsons. They were natural collaborators and allies: a shy, gay kid from the American Midwest, and a trans woman from Chichester. And they reunite to hugely moving effect on In Amber, with Anohni singing lead on the throbbingly ominous single One.
“A song ... to empower young trans, queer and feminine spirits” is how they describe One in a press release. And though Butler doesn’t necessarily want to speak on behalf of trans people, he is entirely supportive of Anohni’s lyrics, which argue everyone’s humanity should be cherished and respected. That message arrives at a fraught time for the trans community, which just this year has been subjected to cruelty and ridicule by mainstream comedians.
“Many people around me identify as trans or nonbinary. It’s always been most important to me, that we see the humanity in each other,” says Butler. “This idea of dehumanising some segment of the population, it’s happened in various ways in many different forms. I think it’s just easy. My personal take on it is: lead with love, lead with the heart. Offer respect and basic human rights to everyone.”
Brooding quality
In Amber is a departure for Butler. Those familiar Hercules grooves have been replaced by doomy 1980s guitars and drumming by Siouxsie and the Banshees percussionist and co-founder Peter Edward Clarke, aka Budgie. Leaning into influences such as Dead Can Dance’s Within the Realm of a Dying Sun and This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End in Tears, the record radiates a magnificently bruised and brooding quality. It is also autobiographical in so far as it taps into Butler’s teenage years as a goth, which preceded his discovery of dance music aged 15 (his first DJ gig was in a leather bar in downtown Denver).
“Before I got to the nightlife, that is where I found my place. Those clubs allowed kids put on eyeliner, have a big Mohican and wear all black — in America, what were called goth clubs. Those places, as a teenager, were the first places I went to before I got to the techno clubs. I was going to these others spaces with people the normies or mainstream kids might view as freaks.”
It was around this time that he discovered Sinéad O’Connor. She is still a guiding light. To a gay kid growing up in a religious community, her songs about repression and breaking free of the chains of your parents landed forcefully.
“Sinéad O’Connor was hugely important to me. When I first saw Mandinka, I thought to myself, ‘This is a fearlessness I’ve never seen before. Maybe I have a place in this world.’ She’s been on a spiritual journey her whole life. I respect her immensely. She’s a seeker.”
As an American who has lived in Europe for more than a decade (first Vienna, now Ghent), Butler has a keenly observed perspective on recent upheavals in his home country. He is appalled by Trumpism and the roll-back on reproductive rights for women. And he has strong opinions on the epidemic of gun violence and school shootings. Back in Denver, an acquaintance of his family was murdered in one such incident.
“Gun violence is directly affecting my friends in Colorado. There are people I knew first-hand who were gunned down — by a shooter who had written one of those manifestos and had named her specifically. This was a person from my teenage years; a friend of my younger brother. The lack of willingness to regulate — or altogether get rid of — some of these policies is mind-boggling.”
It’s been heavy conversation. And yet Butler, as a survivor, is ultimately an optimist. He keeps going because he believes in a better tomorrow. And he’s looking forward to bringing In Amber on the road and turning these torrid songs into a celebration of coming through the dark and looking to the dawn.
“I’m going to be touring selectively. But I’m very excited about the live show. It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be a different experience. It’s definitely still a dance party at moments.”
In Amber is released on June 17th
