Burning Cross
Black Sabbath staat weldra weer op het podium, Bobby Liebling verwerft wereldfaam dankzij Instagram Reels en Witchcraft keert terug naar z’n roots. Nooit gedacht dat ik deze woorden zou schrijven, maar 2025 blijkt het jaar waarin doom haar revival beleeft.
Witchcraft brengt op 23 mei z’n zevende album 'IDAG' uit en kiest voor een geluid waar de fans van het eerste uur op zaten te wachten. Burning Cross levert alvast een veelbelovend voorproefje: progressief, zwaar en met heerlijk fuzzy riffs. Horen we daar trouwens een knipoog naar Pentagram?
Decibel Magazine verwoordt het perfect: "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..." Burning Crosscombineert de klassieke Witchcraft-elementen: heavy, melancholisch en doordrenkt met die occulte doomvibe die hun vroege albums tot cultfavorieten maakte.
Een must voor fans van Black Sabbath, Coven, Kadavar en alles wat traag en zwaar is.
IDAG komt uit op 23 mei 2025 via Heavy Psych Sounds .
Info
More than 20 years after their debut, Witchcraft’s seventh album, ‘IDAG,’ is an awaited full accounting of who they are as a band. Those who have clamored for the return to an earlier sound rooted in ‘70s 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. Founding guitarist/vocalist Magnus Pelander says: “This album will reap souls and destroy wicked minds. And perhaps mend a couple of broken ones.”
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. – Words by JJ Koczan
