The Windish Agency

Gauntlet Hair has announced their new album, Stills, to be released July 16 on Dead Oceans. The band has shared the first single from the album, “Human Nature,” with Pitchfork today. Recorded during Portland, Oregon’s grey winter days in producer Jacob Portrait’s (Unknown Mortal Orchestra) appropriately named studio “The Cave,” the album reveals Gauntlet Hair’s guileless affection for the goth industrialists and post-punks who blazed a shadowy path through the 80s and 90s. Lead track, “Human Nature,” starts with vaguely menacing whispers and a cicada-winged heartbeat that flowers into a grand, gorgeous squall.

The album follows the once-Denver-based band’s 2011self-titled debut for Dead Oceans and singles spread across labels like Forest Family and Mexican Summer. After moving back to their hometown of Chicago last year, drummer Craig Nice and singer/guitarist Andy R. looked to their teenaged selves for inspiration. “I started listening again to the stuff I would have in my discman in the back of my mom’s car,” says Nice. “White Zombie, Marilyn Manson — the production on those records is so amazing. Nothing sounds like that anymore.”

Mining that childhood nostalgia for inspiration has proved effective. The tracks on Stills have the signifiers of industrial and minimal-wave a la The Durutti Column or Joy Division, but all the fluidity and momentum of INXS or Depeche Mode’s 80s synth-pop. “New To It” reimagines the opening snare from “I Wanna Dance Wtih Somebody” at a goth dance party. Andy R. lurches into an unearthly guttural groan halfway through “Bad Apple.” “Spew” is a distorted wash of junky-punk. A Cobain-like sneer worms its way out of “Heave.” The horror and joy combine to make Stills a garden of dark delights.