A Gritty First Look At Lions And Ore From Moline’s Dark Post-Punk Outsiders
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The House Flies make music that seems to emerge from somewhere just beyond the edge of town, where fields darken into silhouettes and familiar streets begin to feel slightly estranged. On Derelict Crawl
, that atmosphere tightens into something more physical. The first glimpse of Lions and Ore moves with a clipped post-punk insistence, driven by steady drums, dense guitar lines, and a refrain that reduces the song’s unease to four blunt words: “We don’t belong.”
Based in Moline, Illinois, The House Flies have built their dark alternative vocabulary from goth rock, shoegaze, grunge, and colder strains of melodic guitar music. Derelict Crawl
narrows those influences into a particularly severe frame. There are traces of Protomartyr’s nervous economy, Interpol’s nocturnal tension, and Joy Division’s stark repetition, but the band use those references as architecture rather than destination. The arrangement keeps pressing forward, letting repetition become its own form of pressure.
That tension is carefully managed. Guitars accumulate rather than explode, gathering around the rhythm in low, heavy layers before the song drops into quieter passages where the surrounding emptiness becomes more noticeable. The House Flies understand how absence can make heaviness register more clearly; every retreat gives the next swell greater physical presence.
The lyrics deepen that unease through fragments of ordinary deterioration. Dial tones, worn leather, summer heat, and bodily collapse appear like details glimpsed through half-open doors, giving Derelict Crawl
the texture of somewhere abandoned but not entirely empty. There is dust in the imagery, hot pavement and ageing structures, the suggestion of places that continue holding memories long after the people inside them have moved on.
Alex Riggen, who fronts the band alongside Burnie Eckhardt, Ozzie Woods, and Nick Pompou, describes the track as a deliberate entry point into Lions and Ore. “We kept coming back to this one as the first song to release and show a glimpse into the new album,” he explains. “It has some of the record’s weight and repetition without giving away too much of what comes later.”
Across seven tracks, Lions and Ore stretches those ideas into longer, more patient forms. Rural landscapes recur alongside old houses, weather, sleep, repetition, and a creeping sense of structural failure. Fields become spaces of isolation; houses carry history; repetition suggests both ritual and entrapment.
The album also captures the current four-piece lineup fully assembled across a The House Flies full-length for the first time. That configuration brings additional weight without sanding away the band’s rougher contours. Derelict Crawl
provides the threshold: a song of displacement, repetition, and gathering pressure, with the ground beneath it already beginning to give way.
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