AN NCS PREMIERE: VOID WITCH — “HORRIPILATING PRESENCE”

“Void Witch is a doom/death collective out of Texas/US, formed from ex-members of Azoth, Shitstorm and Drainbow during the Years of Great Plague and conceived as a collective project to give unearthly voice to the gruesome maunderings of our corrupted and degenerate minds.”

That is how Everlasting Spew Records introduces Void Witch and their forthcoming debut album Horripilating Presence to people who may not yet have encountered them through their 2021 first demo or their daunting and deleterious self-titled debut EP, which crawled from rotten black earth in 2022. The label’s preview continues this way:

“Void Witch’s aesthetic is an unholy marriage of classic doom metal, old school death metal, and grunge sensibilities with themes of body horror, gruesome myth, murder ballads, and other cautionary tales.”

But Void Witch have provided their own introduction:

“Creating our debut album as a bunch of middle-aged dads is an exercise in absurdity. Chained by responsibility, the mechanical habits of life, a lack of time and energy at the end of every long day, we pushed to write and record these songs over the course of a few years. This album exists because we needed it to exist, because our world-worn sanity needed a brief escape. We hope you enjoy this labor of absurdity.”

Life in general is of course relentlessly absurd, often with no rhyme nor reason to how it unfolds or how it ends. Often, however, its own absurdities make it tolerable, especially when they fuel and become manifest in music like you’re about to hear.

But let’s also be clear about this new Void Witch song, which is the new album’s title track: While the band’s own humility about their endeavors comes through in the quotation above, “absurd” is probably the last word that will spring to your minds when you listen to the skin-shivering fascinations of “Horripilating Presence“.

The clean notes that vividly ring in the song’s opening moments are mysterious and intriguing. They create both forlorn and curious sensations — which makes the hard-charging outburst that blasts them away even more startling.

Anchored by methodical percussive mortar fire, Void Witch jolt the senses with feverish riffing that skitters and writhes, cavernous gutturals, and subterranean bass movements. The guitars seem to wail and moan, and to spiral up and convulse in displays of delirium. The vocals explode in rabid strangled screams, and the drums also explode in furiously hammering fusillades.

The song proves to be an ever-changing escapade, with clean notes ringing again and the drums bounding and popping. The riffing feverishly glitters and also becomes expansive. A piercing guitar wails again up in the rafters, and another seems to muse and meander. The song almost seems to stop — but then becomes a roiling and battering sonic seizure, a strange and electrifying setting for muttered words and vehement pronouncements.

And so, as you’ve probably gathered from what you’ve already read, this song is far, far away from what you might have expected by that “doom death” label you saw in the first paragraph. For sure, it’s malignant and destructive, but also fascinating and ingenious in its contrasting permutations, which venture beyond the conventional realms of doom and death into an intriguing (yet still pernicious) otherworld.

Everlasting Spew will release Horripilating Presence on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats on July 26th, with a vinyl edition forthcoming in the autumn of this year. It features album art by Jaime Zuverza, and it’s recommended for fans of Hooded Menace, Temple Of Void, Coffins, and Druid Lord. Pre-orders are available now:

PRE-ORDER:
[PHYSICAL] https://tinyurl.com/38h95yse
[DIGITAL] https://tinyurl.com/mv5u7kv6

VOID WITCH:
https://voidwitchtx.bandcamp.com/album/void-witch-2021-demo
https://www.facebook.com/voidwitchtx