Album Review
The Darts
Halloween Love Songs
All formats
Released 3 March 2026
Seattle’s All-Women Garage-Rock Road Warriors release their sharpest LP yet! Halloween Love Songs. It is great stuff, says Ged Babey, but it’s not the album which is gonna see them break into the mainstream.
I do love this band. They have everything. The sound, the look, the skill, the humour and the songs…. and they have the capability to take the ‘Garage-Punk’ sound overground to Joe Public rather than stay underground with the cool kids – to go from cult/niche to mainstream (Nirvana, Green Day style). Them and The Courettes.
I saw The Darts live last year and they really were great! Loads of energy and noise and atitood – all in black, all legs and leather and lace. The Darts are a sexy band – but of course not in a demeaning-themselves way – they are cartoon goth-horror-sex-bat sexy. They are in control.
The singer/keyboard-player Nicole Laurenne leads a double-life as a Circuit Judge FFS. Calling themselves ‘Spooky Kitten Garage Punk’ is perfect, as is the cover art, depicting a female skeleton in heels in a cross-legged seductive pose. These are women musicians who want to be adored – as artists with a sense of fun and vintage glamour – but not objectified just for their looks.
They are RIYL: The Cramps, The Trashwomen, Mudhoney, The Seeds, Death Valley Girls, Dead Weather… and their high-profile fans include Dave Vanian to Stephen King to Jello Biafra.
Known for genuine, close-to-the-crowd performances and Nicole Laurenne’s honest connection with the room, the band brings people into the show and plays from real joy rather than polish. What Halloween Love Songs shows is a band not riding momentum but steering it.
The spark for the record came during a 2024 Rock n Folk interview in Paris. Singer and keyboard player Nicole Laurenne joked that Halloween deserved more than one novelty hit. By the time she got home, the joke had grown teeth.
“I didn’t want an album that was just monster-costumes on the playground,” she says. “Side A is full of colorful, early-evening energy, the kind of songs you could blast while the neighborhood lights are flicking on. But Side B is the soundtrack for after dark, when the bonfire is raging. It’s for sweaty middle-of-the-night dancing, making out on a bed of empty candy wrappers, and spinning through an all-nighter apocalypse.”
It is a concept album, but not a themed gimmick. More like a two-sided mood built from years of shows where danger, joy, humor, sweat, and catharsis all live in the same hour.
Side A kicks off with the slinky strut of “Midnight Creep,” a live favorite built around a custom dance that has been breaking crowds from Switzerland to Cincinnati. Tracks like “Zombies on the Metro” and “Every Night Is Halloween” expand the early-evening palette, driven by Nicole’s Farfisa grit, Rebecca Davidson’s guitar snarl, Lindsay Scarey’s low-end punch, and the heavy snap of returning original drummer Rikki Styxx.
Side B is where the night deepens. “Apocalypse,” inspired by the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, France, hits with a caveman stomp, Mudhoney-thick fuzz, and the now-iconic “No Kings” refrain, a line Nicole wrote about shedding oppression that later surfaced as a protest chant across the U.S. long before the band had released a note. Cuts like “The Devil Made Me Do It” and “Darkness” push the band into heavier territory: chant-driven, hypnotic, and built for sweaty clubs at one in the morning.
What separates Halloween Love Songs from past Darts records is the sense of intent. It is bigger, more focused, and feels like a culmination of years spent on trains, in vans, on festival stages, in basements, through line-up changes, and inside the tight-knit world of international garage-punk.
You may have noticed that I have let the Press Release do the talkin’…. which is because, it’s all true….but…. I have some reservations. The lead vocals are too low in the mix for my liking. And it’s tracks like the more atmospheric love-song Haunt Me which are actually better than the hard-rockin’ ones. Much more Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon meets Never Met A Girl Like You Before in style.
The Darts have a bit of a business-like professionalism about them and their sound does go into corporate – Epitaph style punk rather than the valve amp garage purism – but they aint pretending to be glorious amateurs like Wild Billy.
It’s a great album – but it doesn’t quite capture what a cool band The Darts are live.
All words Ged Babey except those in italics which are from the band Press release.
A Plea From Louder Than War
Louder Than War is run by a small but dedicated independent team, and we rely on the small amount of money we generate to keep the site running smoothly. Any money we do get is not lining the pockets of oligarchs or mad-cap billionaires dictating what our journalists are allowed to think and write, or hungry shareholders. We know times are tough, and we want to continue bringing you news on the most interesting releases, the latest gigs and anything else that tickles our fancy. We are not driven by profit, just pure enthusiasm for a scene that each and every one of us is passionate about.
To us, music and culture are eveything, without them, our very souls shrivel and die. We do not charge artists for the exposure we give them and to many, what we do is absolutely vital. Subscribing to one of our paid tiers takes just a minute, and each sign-up makes a huge impact, helping to keep the flame of independent music burning! Please click the button below to help.
John Robb – Editor in Chief
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO LTW
Leave a comment