Swedish doom rock legends WITCHCRAFT have released “Spirit”, a soulful and eerie new song taken from their seventh studio album “IDAG”, due on May 23 via Heavy Psych Sounds.
From the depths of the Swedish darkness, “IDAG” emerges, and holy hell, it’s flamboyant. Led by enigmatic guitarist, singer and songwriter Magnus Pelander, these architects of doom who kickstarted the whole analog revival two decades ago and ushered in a new era of occult rock, have spent five years crafting their most intimate opus yet.
After his 2020 acoustic experiment “Black Metal”, Pelander has tapped into transcendence and delivers pure proto-metal sorcery woven through 1970s prog wizardry, with half the tracks performed in his native Swedish tongue for the first time in the band’s history. With just a few acoustic whispers here and there, this is WITCHCRAFT at their most spellbinding. “A smoldering invocation of their signature ’70s-laced, riff-heavy sorcery — both raw and hypnotic, yet laced with an unsettling intensity that lingers long after the final note fades. Heavy yet deeply melancholic, brimming with the occult doom energy that made their early records cult favorites,” describes Decibel magazine.
More than 20 years after WITCHCRAFT‘s debut, “IDAG” is a full accounting of who they are as a band. Those who have clamored for the return to an earlier sound rooted in 1970s classic progressive and heavy rock will delight to the strut of “Irreligious Flamboyant Flame” while the eight-minute opening title track is the heaviest the band have ever sounded, and a succession of interspersed acoustic-based pieces helps create a vision of a new, soulfully folkish doom taking shape as they continue to move inexorably forward.
These enigmatic few words from the Swedish band’s main songwriter give clues as to the songs’ intentions; a reference dropped to COVEN‘s 1969 album “Witchcraft Destroys Minds And Reaps Souls”. COVEN also had a folkish, proto-doomed take at that point in their history, and that multifaceted nature has been a part of WITCHCRAFT all along. On one level, Magnus is winkingly telling you it’s a WITCHCRAFT record. The actual meaning of that becomes clear when you hear the album and find out just how much “a WITCHCRAFT record” can encompass.
The storyline of WITCHCRAFT‘s growth, from Pelander‘s starting the band in Örebro in 2000 in the wake of his prior outfit NORRSKEN‘s disbanding. A generational landmark of a 2004 self-titled debut helped spark a retroist movement that has become its own subgenre, but WITCHCRAFT never stopped growing. 2005’s “Firewood” and 2007’s “The Alchemist” introduced more progressive sounds, and five years later, the pointedly modern “Legend” established in 2012 that they had moved beyond the analog worship they had been a part of pioneering within the contemporary heavy rock and doom scene.
In 2016, the 2LP “Nucleus” introduced fuller-toned doom, and 2020’s “Black Metal” diverged into moody acoustic minimalism familiar to some fans from Pelander‘s early solo work, but different from anything WITCHCRAFT had done prior. “IDAG”, then, is the tie that draws all of this — more than two decades of exploring and growth — together. Whatever they’ve done in the past and whatever they’ll do in the future, “IDAG” feels like a nexus for defining who and what WITCHCRAFT are. Even crazier, that might be the point of the thing.
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