After a relative rest for the two Liège energetics, it’s time to get back to business. And this business is played with four hands, very quickly and listened to with two ears, very loudly. We’re caught up in a furious chase on a steep Belgian motorway with no brakes and no windscreen. It’s imperative to avoid the ruts if you want to survive, the ditch is close, the off-ramp imminent. So here we are, skimming along the guardrail, in a fantastic spray of sparks, being hit with ten hard-hitting tracks and giving off an insane amount of energy. Even if the forays into EBM become more pop (if we can even use that word here), punk becomes ever more synthetic, kraut is percussive and martial, but with Le Prince Harry, indus has been moving very fast for a long time now: at 140bpm on the hard shoulder.

Five years ago, they were thought to be worn out by touring, washed out by the millions of kilometres they’d covered linking the warm Parisian cellars, the stages of titanic festivals, the German ‘Autonomes Zentrum’, the bars of Reunion Island, the gothic clubs of Warsaw and the Smacs of remote regions.

‘After the Be Your Own Enemy tour (2019), we put the project on hold. There had been a few attempts: an aborted new beat album – of which we kept a few snippets on the album -, a few tracks on friends’ compilations as well… Then we regularly sent each other ideas, but frankly it didn’t take too well, it was sluggish.

Then, at the end of 2022, we rented this studio in Sweden, with some friends, in a remote corner, far from the temptations of the party, to see what would come out. We programmed the simplest beat in the world with a 707, Snon played a slightly syncopated bass line, we gradually increased the tempo, I put my voice through a chorus and an absolutely outrageous delay and this primal scream came out of my mouth all by itself, a kind of incisive, irreverent and provocative drone that turned into a lyric quite quickly: ‘It’s a long way from the top, It’s a long way down, it’s a slow slow faaaaaaaall’ and then you feel a thrill, a slightly pagan joy in playing punk in a cellar like when you were 15. And we say to ourselves, that’s it, we’re excited, we’re going to do what we’ve always done, play something ultra energetic, completely cathartic and liberating. Something physical. That’s the energy we want to transmit when we play live. People are always on the move at our gigs, and we manage to communicate that thing that makes you want to turn the table upside down and empty your bank account. I mean, I’ve always wanted our music to be the soundtrack to moments of insubordination in people’s lives, those moments when you decide not to go to a job that doesn’t make sense, to break up with a toxic person, to refuse the daily humiliations and dwindling freedoms. In short, something completely adolescent but completely legitimate’.

Lio, singer and founding member

A Long Way Down is a DIY record that was composed standing up, and very hard. The band members composed, recorded, produced and mixed the album themselves, between Belgium, Sweden, France and Greece.

‘We’ve always had this DIY, independent approach. We’ve always offered our labels ‘finished’ products, apart from the mastering, we take care of everything else.

We composed and then recorded the record piece by piece, when and where we could. Snon was producing other bands, while I was working on the music for a Greek film and touring with Rio. It was really disjointed and always surprising, it lasted a year. You can hear it on the record, the tracks are very different from one another, sometimes I get the impression that there are two records in one. We had a hell of a time mixing it all together and making it sound coherent. ‘

The vocals were recorded late into the night, headphones beyond saturation screwed onto the skull and 58 in hand, the MPC and Tempest beats boosted with a distortion pedal, the bass played to the max in a discarded Orange amp, the Moog and Korg pushed to the limit.

‘We like to keep the moments of improvisation, the imperfections, we always favour a good take, an accident over technical mastery. We wanted to keep things a bit rough’.

After tackling the theme of pollution and self-destructive partying in It’s Getting Worse (2012), widespread computer surveillance and malevolent AIs in Synthetic Love (2017), and phone addiction and depression in Be Your Own Enemy (2019), A Long Way Down tackles the theme of falling, the passage of time and disillusionment (but not resignation) with irony and disenchantment. ‘There’s a lot of irony in A Long Way Down. The band has reached ‘summits’ that are no higher than Belgian mountains, and there’s this Belgian-ness precisely in this feeling of being perfectly aware of making a bit of a comeback, but building and playing songs with as much sincerity as possible. There’s this paradox, a mixture of humility and arrogance, an assumed second degree mixed with the most candid honesty. We don’t hide this aspect too much, we just put it forward’.

In terms of content, the album is fairly self-referential. Among the meta tracks, ‘This Is Zip Pop’ wonders whether the band has played this synth line before, whether it’s plagiarism (‘You’ve heard it before, but it’s out of your reach’ – after having had it listened to by many expert and cultured ears, no, it’s an original track). The lyrics of ‘Dig Deep’ and ‘Not Much Fun’ are about being too lazy to write lyrics. Dolce Latte’ is about a flat on the outskirts of Liège that combines all the disadvantages of the city and the country.

The duo have finally got rid of the guitar and several keyboards so that they can travel more easily, keeping only a sampler, a mixing desk, a bass, three small analogue synths, a few effects pedals and two small midi keyboards. These are the only instruments on the record. So this is a resolutely electronic album, but one that covers a wide spectrum of styles. There are tracks like ‘Sea Of Trees’ and ‘Nice and Kind’, with their martial rhythms and a mix of proto-EBM and cold wave, ‘Dolce Latte’, an uncompromising electropunk smash, garage punk tracks like ‘Blow’ and two dancefloor hits, ‘Le Hachoir De Judas’ and ‘La Banane Du Vide’, a kind of nightmarish new-beat. Whatever style LPH visits, it is never more than touched upon, always diverted, personalised to suit this unique, particular style that has led the project to play chno clubs, rock cellars and gothic concert halls.