Luvcat has announced Lovebites, a new EP of murder ballads due May 22 via AWAL, and dropped its lead single "Vampire At The Beach" — a skeletal, piano-led gothic vignette about a lover so unsettling she was "almost waiting for him to bite my neck." If that sounds like a sentence from a Victorian penny dreadful, that's precisely the point.
The Liverpool singer-songwriter — a DIY Magazine Class of 2025 alum and NME 100 pick — is sharpening the vaudevillian darkness of her 2025 debut Vicious Delicious into something more explicitly dangerous. Lovebites will feature contributions from Pete Doherty (on an unreleased track called "Electric Chair") and punk poet John Cooper Clarke (lending his voice to the anniversary edition of "He's My Man"), an absolutely inspired pairing for an artist whose aesthetic lives somewhere between Nick Cave's murder ballads and Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd.
"Vampire At The Beach" itself is Fellini by way of the Batcave. The first verse opens with dreams of Anacapri — "golden bodies lapped by the sea like melted ice cream" — before curving into something more sinister. By the theatrical finale, Luvcat is declaring "I knew that you would fuck me up forever" with the conviction of someone who's made peace with that particular doom.
The song's inspiration is characteristically cinematic. "I once had this ghostly-looking lover who had this unsettling hold over me," Luvcat told NME. "We were watching a Fellini film and seeing all these golden bodies dripping with sweat on the silky rocks of an Italian beach. I was just thinking: I can't imagine being on a summer holiday with you. You're a vampire."
The EP also includes "Silent Killer," inspired by an almost-fatal carbon monoxide leak at Luvcat's flat in Camberwell that nearly killed her and two bandmates. The song channels that near-death experience into the kind of paranoid, claustrophobic storytelling that makes her catalog so compelling — the real world is scarier than the gothic fictions, and she knows it.
"He's My Man" has already clocked 60 million streams — a staggering number for an artist who still operates in the liminal space between cult following and mainstream breakout. Lovebites feels like the project that could push her over that threshold, especially with the Doherty and Clarke co-signs lending the EP additional gravity.
Luvcat's 2026 live schedule is stacked: she's opening for The Waterboys this summer and will appear at Isle of Wight Festival, TRNSMT, Boardmasters, and Neighbourhood Weekender. She previously supported The Libertines and The Last Dinner Party, and played Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds in 2025. At this rate, the venues are only going to get bigger.
Lovebites is out May 22 via AWAL. Pre-order now.