A population over 120 times bigger than Torquay’s quickly overwhelmed Spychalski. He feared he’d made a mistake. “Despite having fetishized and looked at London for a long time, I still had, in a sense, a village mentality,” he admits. From knowing his neighbors’ every move, to not knowing who even lived in the room above, it was a culture clash that he combatted with creativity. Before his move, he’d seen only two or three live shows, and so he swan-dived into London’s music scene. It soon became a homogenous mass of plaid shirts and indistinguishable white noise.

“Initially it was extremely exciting just to see anybody on stage, because it was something I’d seen so few times in my life,” he says. “But, maybe because of that position of newness and naivety, I was able to see very quickly how similar everything was. Everything seemed very uniform. I’d go and see bands and it’d just be four dudes on stage playing guitars and staring at their shoes. I got really bored—I was a lot more interested in trying to change that. There was no showmanship and there was no attention being paid to the audience: it seemed very solipsistic.”

A series of chance meetings initiated that sea-change. One too many bevies in a London pub one night left a panic-riddled Spychalski in the arms of a drunken Duke, a Parisian guitarist with a similar disdain for musical mundanity. They swapped stories through the night to bring Spychalski back from his drug-addled brink, and the following morning saw the sun rise on a new London, with Spychalski and Duke at its fore. Others soon joined their patchwork group—keyboardist Zac, a circuit-bending enthusiast who Duke had met through sound manipulation threads on Reddit and the less vile corners of 4chan, and James, a fellow guitarist who’d taken up board and lodging with Spychalski after his own terrified move to the city.

They squeezed their six-headed new guise into a practice room and began hashing out a sound as far removed from London’s sludge-rock du jour as possible. Inspired by their own anxieties and disparate backgrounds, the “anything goes” music and mentality of HMLTD became the refuge for their true selves—ones which they were still fearful to put forward. Spychalski himself spent four months sat in the corner of the practice room, reluctant to pick up a mic in front of his new friends, let alone an audience. “We didn’t play the venues where other bands played, because we were almost too scared to get in contact with the promoters,” Spychalski admits. “What we ended up doing was playing real toilet venues—comedy clubs, or pay-to-play promoters, the real lowest of the low.” Inspiring awe and anger in equal measure, Spychalski soon found his flow.

Nowadays, HMLTD are at the forefront of London’s modern creative renaissance. Spearheading a bunch of fearless, mind-melting new bands like Sorry, Goat Girl and Shame, and inspiring their fans to shake off their own small-town shackles, their upcoming debut album looks set to inspire a new generation in the same way London once inspired Spychalski. They’re a beacon all of their own, skulking stages with that same pomp and power Romeo wooed his muse with—violent delights in a world of safe conformity.