Leeds trio Pulled Apart By Horses take back the keys to the kingdom with an album of freshly charged new tracks. ‘Dopamine Hits’, their sixth album and first to be released independently via their own label, Damage Limited Records, will be released on the 12th of February, marking the start of a new chapter.
Pulled Apart By Horses have never done things the easy way. Across five albums and nearly two decades, they’ve built their reputation on loud, chaotic shows in sweaty rooms and festival fields. Now, after a period of upheaval, they return with a record that feels like a reset, but not a retreat. It’s abrasive, immediate and restless, packed with fuzzed-up guitars, pounding drums, synths, warped textures and huge hooks, while leaving plenty of room for strange turns, darker moods and unexpected moments of vulnerability. But underneath it all is a charged sense of freedom – it’s the sound of a band rediscovering the impulsive, gonzo spirit that first made them, and the joy that comes from being able to follow an idea simply because it feels good.
Today they share “Great White Lies”, the album’s opening track and the song that set the whole thing in motion.
“This track came as a bit of a ‘lightbulb moment’ for us early on in the writing stages and ended up being a blueprint sonically, opening up the creative floodgates for the rest of the album,” explains Tom Hudson. “Initially, it was just a loop of the bassline & drums which we then jammed over with abrasive, push-and-pull fuzzed up guitar lines.”
It’s a bouncing track in constant motion, where whooshes and zooms of electronic distortion collide with guitar lines that spring back and forth, capturing the boundless energy and instinctive, relatable anthems that have always made Pulled Apart By Horses such a vital band, whilst also introducing what happens when you then put those anthems “through the Lynch-hole”.
“Great White Lies” video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/l-puirdW2DM
Other “Great White Lies” streaming links: https://ffm.to/pabh-greatwhitelies
‘Dopamine Hits’ album links: https://ffm.to/dopaminehits
Getting to the point where Pulled Apart By Horses were ready to start writing again required some things to change. The years following the band’s last record demanded some difficult decisions. Bad apples were weeded out, dead wood cut loose and old deals began to unravel. “We’d been locked inside a house party that had got wildly out of hand,” they explain. “Strangers had wandered in, taken what they wanted and left the place a mess. We’ve spent the last few years cleaning it up, changing the locks and making sure next time it’s invite only.”
Life away from the stage was changing too: families grew, children arrived and priorities shifted. After a few ups and downs, Tom Hudson, Rob Lee and Tommy Davidson-Hawley found themselves back at the core of the band: still mates, still with their rehearsal room in Leeds, and still loving making music together.
For the first time in a long time, there was no outside structure around the band determining what came next. No deadlines, no campaign to work towards and no expectation of what another Pulled Apart By Horses record should be. The idea was simple: go back to being a DIY band at the core, write music for themselves, surround themselves with people they trust and work well with, and make the whole thing work on their own terms.
They started meeting once or twice a week at Role Model, their Leeds lock-up and creative bunker, where they’ve had their gear set up and ready to record for years. Rob’s move from bass to guitar had accidentally broken down the old assumptions about who was meant to do what, and suddenly everything was up for grabs. And the band had more time than ever to experiment, building the songs in their own space before taking them into the studio with old friend and producer James Kenosha, who recorded some of the band’s earliest singles and their self-titled debut.
By the time they reached James’ studio in the industrial outskirts of Hull, the bare bones of the album were already there. The studio became a place to push them further: slowing things down, speeding them up, adding synths, piano, guitar feedback, gang vocals, strange noise textures and whatever else might make a section more interesting. Sessions were recorded in short bursts over the best part of a year, fitted around work, families and gigs, with the band using the time between sessions to reflect, road-test songs live and come back ready to keep experimenting.
It was here that the “Lynch-hole” became a recurring part of the process. At Role Model, an overexcited elbow had accidentally gone through the wall. A while later, they found a magazine with a feature on David Lynch in it, tore out the page and put it into the hole. It became a little hidden shrine to one of their collective creative heroes. When recording ‘Dopamine Hits’, “put it through the Lynch-hole” became shorthand for taking something somewhere weird and freaky: sending a section into a swampy, warped chasm of reverb, giving the guitars a surfy, seedy vibe, tripping out the vocals with space echo, then pulling it back into the track.
Lyrically, ‘Dopamine Hits’ absorbs a lot of what has been happening in and around the band: uncertainty, overwhelm and anxiety, betrayal and broken trust, ego and insecurity, becoming parents, getting older, technology and social media, online personas and the daily reality of living in a world of too much information. But running alongside the chaos is a desire to trust your gut, stay real, accept yourself and keep moving.
The title started as a joke. There was a long list of possibilities, but ‘Dopamine Hits’ was the one they kept coming back to. It felt bold and right – a nod to cheap fixes, societal pressures, constant distractions and the little hits everyone seems to spend their lives chasing. The band also liked the idea of a play on “Greatest Hits”: every song on the album a hit for the dopamine chasers.
Ultimately, ‘Dopamine Hits’ is about the band finding their way back to the thing that mattered in the first place: three mates spending time together, making art, following ideas and making a racket.
It’s that sense of freedom that runs right through ‘Dopamine Hits’. “There’s a raw honesty to it. We’re not trying to be anything else. It’s just us having our best shot at expressing ourselves after everything we’ve been through and everything we’ve learnt.”
Pulled Apart By Horses live:
24 October – Brighton – Mutations Festival
04 Dec – Kirkgate Community Centre, Shipley
05 December – Leicester – O2 Academy (Handmade Festival)
25 Feb – Room 2, Glasgow
26 February – Leeds – Brudenell Social Club
27 February – London – Moth Club
‘Dopamine Hits’ tracklist:
1. Great White Lies – official video
2. Get It Together
3. Dr. Ego
4. Beta-Male
5. Weirdo / Little Fish
6. Streamlined & Moisturised
7. Ride Or Die
8. Main Character
9. Pass No Judgment
10. Stress Manifest
11. Testify. Obsolete
12. Kreep It Real
‘Dopamine Hits’ artwork by Drew Millward
