Erotic Secrets of Pompeii - Pitchfork Libra (2025)

Art rock band from Bristol, United Kingdom.Second album from the band that LTW have been calling Future Megastars, for a couple years now. Are they ‘Prog Rock’? Are they the most pretentious or the most brilliantly imaginative band around? Punk evangelic relic Ged Babey should loathe them if he had principles to stick to, but insists they are ‘The Best Band on the Planet? Yeah, but which planet?’

There really isn’t another band around quite like Erotic Secrets of Pompeii. They are Biblical! They are Supernatural! They are a more like a living, breathing Fantasy or Graphic Novel come to life than a rock and roll band.

Or a brilliant, inventive, cinematic movie or mini-series about an alternative universe. (Like the disorientating Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.) Or an imposing work of art/architecture that dominates the skyline of your imagination. They are Mystery, Literature, History, Fantasy, Imagination, Theatre, (After)Life… condensed into the rock band format for serious-fun and art-kicks.

They will attract the Outsider, the Dreamer, the Intellectual, the Cosmologist, the Desperate, the Lost… initially – until they write a breakthrough hit – their Bohemian Rhapsody – and the wider public embrace them.

They are Doctor Who, Terry Pratchett, Black Mirror, Mervyn Peake, pseudo-science, space archaeologists, time-travelling, gender-fluid, shape-shifters…….. (Ged, what you mean is they are art-school peacocks who dress-up and wear kooky make-up, don’t you?) They are aliens who have migrated from distant planets to live among us and create mischief and a new pan-global omni-sexual religion…. (Stop It!)

Pitchfork Libra is a ritual disguised as a record. It is arch, it is alchemical and it is the next chapter of the band’s musical journey. It begins with the image of the Pitchfork – a weapon raised in revolt, thrust into flesh. Then comes the astrological Libra – the scales, once balanced, now shattered. The cosmos cracked open.

Pitchfork Libra explores the eternal cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth – a serpent devouring its own tail. From the feverish hysteria of the Dancing Plague of 1518, to the esoteric trials of Robert Anton Wilson’s Chapel Perilous, to fragmented psychological states stitched together with sound, Pitchfork Libra is a descent and an invocation. Ever-present throughout the myth-soaked album is the ghost of Jack Parsons – rocket messiah, sex magician, tragic prophet of the in-between. He was a man suspended between earth and moon, science and sorcery, modernity and myth. His presence is a thread that weaves through the chaos, binding the sacred to the profane