The House Flies Make Room for the Quiet on Lions and Ore

On Lions and Ore, The House Flies make familiar places feel strangely unsettled. Houses, fields, streetlights and lingering heat recur across the Moline, Illinois band’s second album, where post-punk rhythms give way to atmospheric stillness and surges of heavy guitar. Opener Goodnight, Goodnight, Lover Dear begins with hymnal language and domestic intimacy before expanding into a more imposing arrangement. That movement between closeness and upheaval sets the terms for seven songs preoccupied with memory, dislocation and the uneasy question of where someone belongs.

The record follows the Glimmer EP, Mannequin Deposit and the 2025 single Sweet Foxhound, extending the band’s goth- and shoegaze-influenced guitar music without abandoning its melodic undercurrent. Recorded in guitarist and vocalist Alex Riggen’s basement, it is their first full-length with Burnie Eckhardt on second guitar throughout, alongside bassist Ozzie Woods and drummer Nick Pompou. The four-piece use that expanded lineup to explore longer arrangements, letting rhythms settle and quieter sections gather tension before distortion changes their shape. The heavier moments gain significance from the space around them, rather than volume alone.

That tension takes different forms across the album’s two singles. Lost Literature follows a night drive through fragments of memory, carried by a comparatively immediate, melodic post-punk pulse. Its companion video, populated by handmade marionettes, lends the song’s elusive narrative an uncanny physical form. Derelict Crawl moves with heavier insistence, returning to the repeated line “We don’t belong.” Set against the album’s rural and domestic imagery, the refrain suggests alienation not as a departure from home but as something that can exist within it. The slower Snakes and Toads draws devotional language and animal imagery into a darker, more meditative frame.

On the second side, Count Us Down finds a hypnotic pattern in streetlights and changing weather, its repetition echoing the motion of travel. Shelter Me brings the perspective indoors, where heat and old wire turn familiar surroundings into something more confining. The closing The Glass, The Orchard moves from a quiet recollection of tenderness to a dramatic finale, with a last wish to remain in view. Divided across two sides on vinyl, the record gives that closing sequence a distinct sense of place.

Released through Wilhelm & Sons Entertainment Company, Lions and Ore was mixed by Ross Mixes and mastered by Michael Briggs, with artwork designed by Riggen. The songs are held together by recurring scenes rather than a single storyline: rooms and roads, fields and weather, gestures of shelter that never entirely dispel uncertainty. By the end, the question has narrowed from where to belong to whether someone will still be there to see you.