The House Flies Misplace the Story on Lost Literature

Public libraries quietly withdraw books. They call it weeding. A title that has sat untouched for years gets a stamp, leaves the stack, and sometimes ends up in a dollar bin by the door. The old card in the wooden drawer can linger after the object is gone. People still walk in looking for a book the building no longer owns. The record outlives the thing it pointed to.

The House Flies work in that gap. The band comes out of Moline, in the Quad Cities, where the river towns of Illinois and Iowa sit close enough to share a night and a scene. Alex Riggen started the project almost alone. The four-track Glimmer EP arrived in January 2023 with his voice, guitars, programmed drums and Mellotron. Mannequin Deposit followed in July 2024 from a Moline basement, still a three-piece on record, pressed on a short run of pink vinyl. Nick Pompou had already been playing with Riggen since the gothic grunge band Murnau in 2006. Ozzie Woods held the low end. Burnie Eckhardt came in on second guitar after the first album made the live problem obvious. Riggen had written both guitar parts and could only play one of them onstage. Something from the record always vanished. Sweet Foxhound in September 2025 was the first House Flies recording with Eckhardt on it. Lions and Ore, due November 6 through Wilhelm & Sons Entertainment Company, is the first full-length that belongs to the four of them.

Lost Literature is the second single from that record, after the heavier grind of Derelict Crawl. It runs just under four minutes and it moves. Woods’ bass starts the argument. The line is prominent, slightly chewed, and already dancing before the rest of the band arrives. Pompou keeps the kick and snare straight enough to feel mechanical, then leaves just enough lift that the groove stays human. Guitars come in with jangle and grit rather than a wall. The dark post-punk and goth grain of the album stays underneath. The hook sits on top of it. This is the track on Lions and Ore that wants the room to lean forward.

The words live on a Midwestern night road. A car door. A bowed head in highway dark. Cold in the bone. A radio turned down so low it becomes another kind of weather. Porch light. Clover. Static. Teeth in the car. Wrist and neck growing until they split the back. Riggen has talked about two people who know each other too well, sitting somewhere familiar in a small Illinois town, with no need to keep talking and a quiet urge to leave anyway. The chorus puts them in a rental. No destination attached. A few hours, maybe a day, outside the life that will ask for the keys back.

The refrain does the real work. “And who you are / And who you were / It grows and goes on and on.” Then the title lands like a filing error. “A rental car / Lost literature.” The phrases return without thickening into a plot. That circular habit is the point. Memory does not advance in verses. It repeats until the syllables start to mean something else. Riggen sings with a tired calm rather than a lunge. The voice stays close to speech in the verses, then opens on the hook just enough to leave a mark. The band does not decorate around him. They lock the pulse and let the words keep circling the missing book.

A rental car is a useful object for this kind of writing. It holds you and then forgets you. The radio plays songs you did not write. The clover and the porch light belong to someone else’s house. Lost literature, in that sense, is the writing that never gets catalogued. Motel Bibles. Songs heard once between towns. The version of a person that circulated for a while and then left the stack. The sleeve image, a seated Victorian figure holding a worn volume, makes the title look still. The song puts the volume in motion and then misfiles it.

The video follows the same logic without acting out the lyric. Handmade marionettes move through a spare wooden room in faded 4:3. Riggen found the puppets in a Wisconsin junk store and altered them himself. He is not a puppeteer, and the stiffness helps. Faces, beadwork, strings, awkward feet on a grey floor. Close shots that linger too long. The worn, tactile grain keeps the clip inside the visual world of Lions and Ore instead of turning it into a performance tape. Strings stay visible. That is enough. The song already knows what it feels like to be moved from outside.

Ross Mixes handled the mix. Michael Briggs mastered it. Riggen did the artwork. The seven-track album arrives November 6 on Bandcamp, the usual platforms, and a limited run of 100 black 12-inch copies. That night the band play Raccoon Motel in Davenport with King of the Weirdos, Company Dimes and Half Loves. Lost Literature is the piece you can carry out of the room before the rest of the record fills in the quieter and heavier rooms around it.

What stays is the temperature of the drive. The bass keeps walking. The refrain keeps asking the same two questions. The car will be returned. The book will not be on the shelf when you go back for it. The card, somehow, is still in the drawer.

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Lost Literature is out now.

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