The Dandy Warhols, famous for their hazy psychedelia and stoner-pop swagger, hardly seemed destined to swap their tinted sunglasses for thick eyeliner. Yet, in 2012, with the release of their eighth studio album, This Machine, the indie world—or at least their friends—declared that the Portland crew had finally turned Goth. This alleged sartorial and sonic shift was less a dramatic transformation and more an amusing accident, a case of one collaboration changing the entire narrative, even as the band insisted the whole thing was simply “woody.”

The smoking gun for this supposed descent into darkness was unequivocally the track “The Autumn Carnival.” The band strategically brought in David J. of the pioneering post-punk and gothic rock outfit Bauhaus and Love & Rockets to co-write and provide bass. Hiring a founding member of one of Goth’s most essential bands is equivalent to asking Dracula to decorate your house; of course, it’s going to end up dark and spectral. The very nature of this pedigree, combined with the album’s overall stripped-down, moody atmosphere of throbbing bass-lines and hushed vocals, led outside observers to quickly label it the band’s “gothiest” record. The album even boasts the slow, booming track “Rest Your Head,” which critics rightly singled out as genuinely “goth-tinged.”

However, the reality of This Machine is much funnier than the myth. While their friends were calling them the next Sisters of Mercy, frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor was defensively calling the record his “grungiest.” The album itself is a glorious mess of inconsistency that defied any clean genre label. The tracklist includes the opening aggressive fuzz of “Sad Vacation,” Taylor-Taylor channeling Iggy Pop on “Enjoy Yourself,” and, most bafflingly, an ill-fitting, skronking saxophone cover of the country/folk standard “16 Tons.” When your dark, existential masterpiece breaks the mood with a coal miner’s lament, it’s hard to take the whole Goth transformation seriously. The Warhols never truly became Goth; they simply wove a little black velvet thread into their tapestry, proving that sometimes, a minor collaboration and a great marketing hook are all it takes to convince the world you’re ready to spend the rest of your life sulking in a velvet cloak.