Last year, the German pop songstress Kim Petras and members of the newly formed spooky supergroup Lovecraft each independently noticed something spine-chilling. Halloween, their favorite holiday, one practically invented for theatrical parties and foggy dance floors, had been neglected. There hadn't been a classic Halloween song since... Michael Jackson's "Thriller"? Bow Wow Wow's cover of "I Want Candy"? Outkast's "Dracula's Wedding"? Why, they wondered, has the most haunted holiday in America become the one most devoid of modern day anthems?
Petras says she had that thought in the summer of 2018, when she and some friends wrote "Close Your Eyes," a shimmering, futurist John Carpenter movie of a song. "It became really spooky, and it sounded dark," Petras says. "And we were wondering why there are so many Christmas records and no Halloween records."
Around the same time, the veteran songwriter-producers Peter Wade, Evan Bogart, and MNDR-who have worked with artists like Jennifer Lopez, Sean Paul, and Charli XCX and are friends and fellow Halloween obsessives-had a similar thought. "We grew up listening to all of these old [Halloween] songs that we loved, but they're old songs," Wade says. "Why haven't there been new ones?"
None of the artists knew the answer, but they all set out to remedy the situation. Petras holed up in Hawaii (which she claims is quite spooky at night despite its idyllic reputation) for a couple of weeks to write a themed album before she embarked on a tour. And Wade, Bogart, and MNDR recruited a few industry friends who were equally passionate about the holiday to Frankenstein together a Halloween-focused band. (The members of Lovecraft-named after the horror fiction icon -even went so far as to give themselves frighteningly horrid stage names: Wade is Norman Crates, Bogart is Lil Punkin, and MNDR is Deepkutz; the group also includes Sarah Barrios as Scary Ana Grande, Scott Hoffman as Ghost M'lone, Justin Gray as Count Trackula, and Romell as DejaVudu.)
Often, things seem most absent when they're actually bubbling up. You can feel the draft of a ghost even if you can't quite see or touch it. So Petras and Lovecraft may have been subconsciously responding to a spell of dark sounds and aesthetics- ominous minor key melodies, emo crooning, and haunted house hair-that were sweeping through pop music. Billie Eilish, Juice WRLD, and much of their SoundCloud cohort may not have been making Halloween music per se, but they were certainly dressing up and playing in graveyards. The theatricality of the '80s and the macabre aesthetics of the early aughts were cycling back into style, and Petras and Lovecraft responded with a gleeful howl.
But where Petras and Lovecraft were creating with similar intentions and equal enthusiasm, the albums they produced, Turn Off The Light and This Is Halloween: Vol. 1, are as different as this costume and this one.
Petras's Turn Off The Light is thick power pop, a strobing, cinematic dance record from a villain's perspective. It's sleek and heavy, with sinister interludes and BDSM overtones (a lyric on the song "Death by Sex": "Baby, what you like? Anything you wanna try? / You gon' love the way you die, way you die, yeah"). "I felt like I had a really specific angle," Petras says. "Mixing classic '80s synths, horror movie soundtrack feels, with German techno underground rave music."
And indeed, Turn Off The Light is a fairly singular work: eerier than your typical dance album, but just as suitable for an April club night. Petras's voice is sweet as a Starburst, which can alternately soften the haunting industrial productions or be demonically infected by them. She seems bent on seducing the listener and then slashing them up (stabbing and sharpening knife sound effects litter the record). Perhaps most remarkably, when Petras sings the chorus "There will be blood" on a song of the same name, you don't immediately think of oil or milkshakes.
If Turn Off The Light is the soundtrack to a zombie rave, This Is Halloween is more befitting a family costume party. Stemming from its large team of creators, it's as varied as the contents of a pillowcase after a night of trick-or-treating. There are traces of funk ("Skeleton Sam"), rhythm & blues ("Voodoo"), and what the group calls "ghost trap" ("Spooky"), all in a catchy, bright black-and-orange context. The group used new machines-modern synths and plug-ins-to produce old sorts of hair-raising sounds. That means creeks, croaks, gurgles, and evil laughs. With its campy, sing-along choruses and danceable rhythms, This Is Halloween is a clear ancestor of iconic Halloween hits like "The Monster Mash" and "Thriller"; ultimately, it prizes fun over frights.
But the most interesting thing about This Is Halloween is arguably its modern twist: It was designed to be interactive. "With the song 'Spooky,' the chorus goes 'Spooky! Spooky!... Spooky? Spooky!', and it's basically something we're directing towards kids using TikTok and Triller," says Wade. "If you play that song and then you strike spooky poses in your costume while you're yelling 'Spooky!', it begs you to create things in a Halloween style." Beyond the album, Lovecraft also released pre-sets of scary sounds to inspire a next generation of music-making witches and wizards. And as the "Vol. 1" in the title suggests, building a Halloween catalog will be an ongoing project, meaning more scares are hidden around the next bend.
Lovecraft's members say they want This Is Halloween to be played all year round, but it's hard to imagine another context for the songs. Where Petras channels Halloween's multi-purpose tones-its horror and dangerous eroticism-Lovecraft is consumed with its specific totems (skeletons, ghosts, graveyards). As a result, a song like "Spooky" would be as out of place in December as "Jingle Bells" would be right now.
But if Lovecraft can create Halloween's answer to "Jingle Bells"-or even " Carol of the Bell"-their music's seasonal appeal won't matter. In addition to apps like TikTok and Triller, streaming itself incentivizes the creation of Halloween standards. Last October, "Thriller" briefly returned to the Hot 100 thanks to its place on Halloween playlists. And "Hells Bells" and the Ghostbusters theme have gotten more play in my house this month than they had the previous eleven combined.
It wasn't so long ago that soundtracking a Halloween party was, well, a frightening task. But with today's effortless digital tools and a digital marketplace hungry for haunted bops, Turn Off The Light and This Is Halloween might mark the beginning of a Halloween music renaissance. And with so many of today's biggest stars dressed for Halloween year-round, Petras and Lovecraft better watch out for what's lurking in the shadows.
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