Hurtsfall, Nottingham’s noir-tinged trio, thrives in the charged space where theatrical tension collides with synthetic pulse. Their latest single, Adore Me, lands like a warning flare: bright, unrelenting, seductive, and strange. What they build here is not simply another chapter in the long saga of post-punk electronics, but a fresh crackle of compulsion and collapse, sung as if devotion itself were a dangerous experiment.
At the heart stands Sam Harrison Emm, voice poised between plea and proclamation, velvet laced with steel. His delivery holds an old-world gravitas—part soul sermon, part synth-drenched confession. Jamie Laws bends circuitry into jagged shapes, synthesizers humming like unstable machinery, while Mike Sinclair anchors everything with the slow throb of a Bass VI, dragging the song into deeper waters. Together, they conjure something ritualistic and raw, a hymn for those who find beauty in the breakdown.
The rhythm creeps, then swells, a plodding bassline suddenly alive with bizarre electronic intrusions, twisting around the vocal line with uncanny precision. Emm describes the track as “like if Depeche Mode and Gary Numan had a baby in Berlin,” though a gleam of Erasure’s melodic instinct flashes through its edges: pop sensibility disguised within gothic ritual.
A strange tenderness lives at the song’s core, even as the arrangement buckles under the weight of obsession and need. Those drawn to the grandeur of The Sisters of Mercy, the neon gloom of Drab Majesty, or the sleek romanticism of Empathy Test will find that same current running through Adore Me. It’s a song stitched to a lineage, yet intent on mutating it into something of its own.
Watch the atmospheric lyric video for “Adore Me” below:
Onstage, Hurtsfall have already carved a reputation as scene-stealers. Their sets—at Whitby Goth Weekend, Goth City, and alongside the likes of Ghost Dance, Aurelio Voltaire and Skeletal Family, unfurl with the force of theatre while retaining the intimacy of a club communion. Adore Me is destined to become a keystone in those performances, its chorus both invitation and command, delivered with the ferocity of a frontman unafraid to tear down the fourth wall.
What sets Hurtsfall apart is their willingness to magnify gothic atmospherics until they feel cinematic, then cut them open with soul-soaked immediacy. The result is music wired for collapse yet brimming with peculiar joy…a paradox that fuels their growing acclaim across the UK alternative circuit.
Listen to Adore Me below and order the single here.
Live Dates:
• 26 July – Rough Trade, Nottingham
• 14 August – Rebellion, Manchester
• 27 September – Fuel the Music, Manchester
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