Salem witch house music is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the late 2000s. It is characterized by its dark and atmospheric soundscapes, incorporating elements of industrial, witch house, and hip-hop music. The genre takes its name from the infamous Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts, which adds to its eerie and occult vibe. Salem witch house music often features slowed-down, distorted vocals and heavy use of reverb and other effects to create a haunting atmosphere. The music typically incorporates samples from a variety of sources, including horror movies, occult rituals, and religious texts. These samples help to further enhance the dark and mysterious nature of the genre.

The Disappearance and Cryptic Return of Salem

The band, which perfectly evoked a certain strain of American scumbaggery, is not interested in anything as boring as redemption.

The band rose to notoriety, stirred up a sandstorm of intrigue, then vanished. Illustration by Siobhán Gallagher

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When it comes to assessing contentious cultural moments, only time can provide the perspective needed to hone one’s judgment. We revise and clarify our understanding of trends and phenomena in hindsight: scandals become milestones, controversies become delights, lowbrow artifacts become national treasures, “major” works feel expendable. In retrospect, disco was actually a complicated and musically significant genre; Kanye West’s monologues were never the brilliant orations we took them to be.

But hindsight has offered little clarity in the case of Salem, a trio of petulant electronic musicians who rose to notoriety a decade ago, stirred up a sandstorm of intrigue and consternation, and promptly disappeared from sight. Formed by twentysomething burnouts from Michigan and Illinois, the band included two scraggly tattooed producers and vocalists, Jack Donoghue and John Holland, and the keyboardist and vocalist Heather Marlatt. (Marlatt is no longer working with the group.) Their music was a heavily distorted fog of blown-out samples, slurring vocals, and allusions to drug use and the occult. The sound was compelling, but often clouded by their shenanigans. Donoghue and Holland enjoyed cultivating a messy public image: Donoghue famously blew off an interview with the Times; when they did manage to engage with the press, the conversations could be outrageous and lurid. They gave such drowsy, lacklustre live performances that even their most passionate fans sometimes booed them off the stage. Salem’s first EP, issued in a run of five hundred highly coveted white-vinyl pressings, in 2008, was called “Yes I Smoke Crack.” This kind of behavior might simply have seemed like obnoxious spectacle if the music were not such a perfect evocation of a certain strain of American scumbaggery—a tone poem that captured the melancholy and the absurdity of a life lived at rock bottom. These musicians were in constant dialogue with the void and having fun with it.

The group brought new energy to a corner of the indie-music world that had gone slack. At the time, a genre of sensuous, lo-fi synth music called chillwave was gaining prominence. A subset of bands that included Salem began making music that sounded like a reaction against chillwave’s perceived tepidness and its oppressive . . . well, chillness. This was the heyday of the music blogosphere, which was fixated on the invention of microgenres. Salem’s cohort was designated as “witch house,” for its spooky style. Witch house had in common with chillwave a tendency to put vibe before substance. But, whereas chillwave hushed listeners into tranquillity, witch house had an unsettling undercurrent that jolted them awake in adrenalized terror. “Demons speak to me, so that’s who I’m leaving with,” Donoghue raps on “Sick,” a standout track on the album “King Night,” from 2010, his vocals pitched down to resemble a devil’s.

Whether you found Salem to be profound, or profoundly unlistenable, probably depended on what kind of mood you were in, and what you’d absorbed from the reams of vitriolic or fawning essays written about the group. Some critics believed that its members were musically unsophisticated hacks or blustering jerks, or that they flippantly drew inspiration from rap music without self-consciousness. If you revisit old writing about Salem, what’s most striking is the sheer volume and enthusiasm of the discourse. One critic described it as “the worst new band in America,” made up of people “too stupid to function as humans, let alone musicians.” Another characterized the début album as “sick . . . not just in the sense that it’s outstandingly good but in the fact that it seems extremely unwell.”

But, as young provocateurs peddling seedy, highly stylized mischief, the trio earned attention from a rarefied segment of the creative class. Michael Stipe and Terence Koh attended an early gig, and Givenchy used Salem’s music for a runway show, in 2011. Kanye West recruited Donoghue to work on his album “Yeezus.” The band remained obscure to most people, but it forecast a number of musical currents, including the eerie, spastic sounds of pop experimentalists, and hip-hop’s turn toward the drugged-out and emotional. Then, in 2011, Salem abruptly stopped making music, for reasons that are still obscure. (Its members are not the type to explain themselves.)

To no one’s surprise, Salem is not interested in anything so dull as a redemption narrative. The band makes this plain on “Fires in Heaven,” its first album in ten years, which came out at the end of October. “Ask me what I’m doing with my life / Ain’t got shit to tell,” a voice announces menacingly on “Capulets,” the bracing opening track. “I don’t have to apologize for shit, that’s another day.” It’s difficult to tell, exactly, who’s speaking, because Donoghue and Holland heavily modulate their voices and sometimes affect a Southern drawl, making them sound more like Houston rappers than like white indie kids from the Midwest. This sleight of hand, which has become quite common recently, allows them to avoid vulnerability, and to shape-shift into alternative identities, access to which they probably haven’t earned—another form of provocation that they’re unwilling to surrender after ten years.

Musically, “Capulets” is classic Salem. The group draws as much from Catholic liturgical music and Gregorian chant as from anything contemporary. (Its biggest song, “King Night,” from 2010, is a screeching interpolation of “O Holy Night.”) On “Capulets,” Donoghue and Holland riff over a lo-fi recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights.” Salem tends to use its pieces as loud, blunt instruments to stir up sensation. This puts it in a lineage of mood-minded musicians that includes the shoegaze artists the Cocteau Twins, the sludgy post-hardcore band Slint, and the narcotic producer DJ Screw. The tracks on “Fires in Heaven” are less like songs than like bursts of melodrama. The record, despite occasionally feeling sloppy and slight, is potent—full of nightmarish energy, bravado, and mysticism.

In the final years of the band’s hiatus, Donoghue reëmerged on Instagram, posting cryptic snapshots. The images had an improvised feel, but, together, they revealed a peculiar, American-gothic sensibility: a dead deer on the side of the road; a sinister flock of crows perched on an electrical wire; a grizzly, bearded man in a tank top shaking a hailstorm of apples from a tree; a raucous religious gathering. Similarly, Salem’s music is a scrapbook of dispatches from the fringes of a nation under siege. This allows the band to evoke horrific events more vividly than if they were described head on. On a song called “Crisis,” a young woman frantically pleads for forgiveness. “It was a mistake,” she screeches. It becomes clear that the song is about a search for a missing person in opioid-addled America: “All up on the news because they say they can’t get you / Walmart parking lot, supposed to forget you.” Donoghue’s raps make it sound as if he may be implicated, and still at large. “I hate it, I hate / Never learning from lessons,” he says. “I hate it / But I should have died on that pavement.”

“Fires in Heaven” has arrived without the antics that attended the group a decade ago. A snippet of “Capulets” first appeared in May, in a mix broadcast on an independent London-based radio show. The song offered no clues about how the members of Salem have experienced the past decade. Their music remains oblique: a bit scary, frustratingly opaque, but absorbing nonetheless. For those who listen closely, there are a few detectable emotional shifts on the album. Occasionally, the sound becomes cleaner and bigger, more celestial than hellish: the lead single, “Starfall,” has the wide-eyed quality of a movie soundtrack. Here and there, Holland and Donoghue’s real voices pierce the thick fog, shifting the mood from nihilistic to yearning. On “Old Gods,” one of them begs, “Give me one more chance to set you free.” For a group possessed of such deadened world-weariness, it’s a startling offer of hope. ♦

BURN THE WITCH: HOW SALEM AND WITCH HOUSE SHAPED THE SOUND OF A DECADE

In the beginning were Daniel Lopatin and James Ferraro, the old and broken radio of the New Weird America in the late 00s, shaped to allucinate with visions of heavenly beaches and palms, like they came straight out of Miami Vice or some other 80s television series, giving rise to a whole movement that, following the lesson of Ariel Pink in the early 2000s, over the years witnessed the alternating of the brief chillwave era, to the rise of both Oneothrix Point Never, as one of the main acts of a whole decade, and, in parallel, James Ferraro, as a reference point for a new intelligent digital music. To define this world of nostalgia, which will end up permeating a substantial part of music since then, we used to resort to different words like “vaporwave”, “glo-fi”, “chillwave”, a specific subgenre for each one, but for a general approximation the scottish journalist David Keenan coined the term “hypnagogic pop”, referring to the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep. Therefore, on the heels of the British hauntological theory to describe the music of Burial or Boards of Canada, here reveal a new manifestation made in USA of the replacement of the future with the virtual, timeless past. A built up, non existent memory, product of the virtual representation, which, in this case, is even limitless and more ecstatic, as well as, on the other hand, more hopeless. Furthermore, a story about ghosts, dreams and memories cannot do without references to eerie, occult and death.

“2009 was the beginning of the ‘witch house’ style. Also known as ‘black house’ or ‘occult house.’ Coined and popularized by SHAMS and myself, two practitioners and advocators of the witch house movement. Mark our words, 2010 will be straight up witchy. Check the fabulously dark “In Your Eyes” by Denver/Amsterdam band Modern Witch, “Pillow Talk” by SHAMS, or the music video for “Goth Star” for examples of the witch house aesthetic.”

This excerpt from a 2009 Pitchfork interview to Travis Egedy AKA Pictureplane is reported to be the first time the term witch house became public, used to indicate artists from the Denver scene as the already mentioned, or cult acts like SHAMS, but immediately after, witch house began to refer to a whole new generation of ephemeral DIY projects for use and consumption of Myspace, Youtube and the early Soundcloud and Bandcamp users, supported by labels like Tri Angle or Disaro.

While bands like HEALTH and Crystal Castles had already established as the new thing, capable of catalizing the attention of hipsters and whoever had that punk attitude, passing from the ex fans of the Myspace scene with all its emo, screamo and metalcore drifts, to the indie kids whit delusions of post punk, a new movement was emerging bearing a brand new rarefied atmosphere, where, like witches, almost everyone who was able to download a pirated software of Fruity Loops, Ableton Live or whatever DAW it was, could actually manipulate their own reality. A generation of white people who grew up listening to hip hop was finally able to make beats without an MPC, at the time of big room house, while Tumbrl was raising, with all its baggage of gothic revival and subliminal interest for chaos magic. The music and the aesthetic of artists like Pictureplane, Modern Witch, crim3s, plus monikers more explicitly related to the occult like Balam Acab and White Ring, up to the cryptically esoteric oOoOO, GL▲SS †33†H and ///▲▲▲\\\, was the hybrid product of all this messed up murky nostalgia, love for geometry and lo fi meltin pot of dark elements, on the wave of an exciting noise scene (suffice it to say that Wavves‘ ear damaging first album was such a cult that year). Triangles, dreamy reverb, club drums and DIY attitude were the keywords of this movement, but was with SALEM (or, at the time, S4LEM) that witch house reached its zeitgeist.

John Holland was born in a rural zone of Michigan and there started having heavy drug problems during high school, also being a teenage prostitute. Then he attended college in Chicago, where meeting the younger Jack Donoghue sort of saved him. The two were making music together, first footwork and juke, then, with the arrival of Heather Marlatt, mixing southern hip hop with all the DJ Screw‘ chopped & screwed experiments (trap was not the name for the mainstream still) and Cocteau Twins kind of dreamy melodies. Of course, the story, which seems to come straight out of “Boys don’t cry” with Chloe Sevigny, plus the extreme coolness of the three, took the critics to identify SALEM as the glossy peak of a movement which they were struggling to take seriously. The fact is that SALEM, along with a name so kitsch and evocative to be absolutely great, strongly pushed the borders of the microgenre, also insisting on what could have been perceived as pure trash, with trance nostalgia, booed live performances or explicit interviews like this. As every self-respecting punk icon, they were able to come with all their package bigger than music, conjugating the usual nihilism & attitude thing in an unprecedented way and, above all, making it real. Even their first EP, “Yes, I smoke crack” dated 2008, was so ahead of their time and anticipated in full the sound of GothBoiClique, Drain Gang, or even Billie Eilish, for one thing, not to mention the influence on East European artists, still found in the music of IC3PEAK and Tommy Cash. Try to listen to “Snakes” and not think of Lil Peep or, even more, of Wicca Phase Spring Aeternal. But is their first album “King Night”, along with the following EP “I’m Still in the Night”, that the music of the trio became so seminal for the current electronic avantgarde scene. Desolate landscapes, shoegaze wall of sounds, rave synths, giant kicks and noise from some accident, a mix of trance and bombing, where Donoghue raps like Lil Wayne at the end of the world. As far as even gamechanging hip hop driven producers like Clams Casino and Shlohmo were products of the witch house scene, the rap element has always been the distinctive feature of SALEM in the scene itself, while other artists were more focused on dreamy female vocals. Some accuse SALEM of cultural appropriation, but I think that the brief but intense story of witch house was nothing but a twist of every influence from black music in something good for punks and hipsters, something completely new that sounded shitty and hardcore, and at the same time could be the soundtrack for the legendary teen drama Skins, while, precisely in 2010, with “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” Kanye West ratyfied a new softer course in mainstream hip hop, and, on the other side, Death Grips’ Exmilitary was yet to come.

Of course, we’re talking about some of the most iconic acts of the last decade, and it goes without saying that something so cryptic to be, at that time, even difficoult to be taken seriously and, at the same time, extremely fascinating as witch house, faded away at the very moment it was exploding, an istant swan song which resulted in some misunderstandings, like people mistaking Crystal Castles as part of the scene, when actually, their only album clearly influenced was their last with Alice Glass, “(III)”, of the period they were hanging around with crim3s. While so many artists, from 2012 till the last years, started to draw on the legacy of their imagery, Salem just disappeared. Apart from a pair of remixes and a (“still unpaid”, as he said) contribution of Donoghue to the production of Kanye West’ “Yeezus”, one of the first bigger example of SALEM’ influence, the Midwest trio, turned into a duo with the only Holland and Donoghue, retired, with alternating bad luck, shitty jobs, incommunicability and an album forever under costruction. But, for an incredible cycle of karma, it has been just the meeting with Henry Laufer AKA Shlohmo, one of the most faithful continuer of what witch house started, to help the two closing the album and putting it out.

The fact that “Fires in Heaven” came out during this terrible year is just tremendously perfect. The hype mounted after the “Stay Down” mixtape appeared on Youtube in September, followed closely by the first single “Starfall” which, needless to say, brought all the kids mourning for Lil Peep on their toes, with its devastated pads, emotional trance synths and extremely sad lyrics. A trap ballad accompanied by a video of the two storm chasing in a car. Global surveillance is, instead, the subject of the video for “Red River”, where the slow rap draws a sort of biblical imagery, theme that returned when the album came out in the end of October, with that title and an artwork depicting an angel in flames in heaven, with the devil hidden behind it. “I would never claim no prophecy cause I know mans too small for it”: these words from the ones who were able to be so unapologetically raw, to accurately predict, with a brand new language, the deep desolation of a decade that has seen a new rise of fascism, the worsening of the environmental disaster and the loneliness of a whole generation, in the year when everything reached its worse climax due to the pandemic, these same words are indicative of the entire world of SALEM. The opening track is the ironic “Capulets”, actual manifesto rapped with tough attitude on Prokofiev’ “Dance of the Knights”. “Money came along problems, shit got me like hell naw // Ask me what I’m doing with my life, ain’t shit to tell ya’ll // They selling these, though, we don’t really need those”; “I don’t see the road, eyes closed, I’ma let it fly.”

The album reaches its climax of desolation in the hallucinated “Wings”, lament on a quiet and minimal alternating of psychedelic arpeggiator and dissonant synths, which turns out to be particularly cathartic to listen in these surreal nights, when the streets are empty and all you can hear is the sound of the ambulance. Instead, “Old Gods” is a moment of liberation, the only track which gives a glimpse of peace trough a chord progression which culminates in the yell of the hook “I met god and asked him what he wants and silence was the answer til I’ve gone. Heaven is a place out here with me, so burn those wings and let us all be free.”
If Shlohmo contribution to the production gives a new luster to the sound of SALEM, well matched with their wasted pop attitude for songwriting, the instrumental “Braids” carries the baton of that original ruined lo fi noise. Finally, with the same jaded irony of the opening track, in a Moby mood the refrain “it’s not much of a life you’re living” closes an album about fallen angels left in the lurch, who just feel free in the power of choosing their own heaven, blind in the traffic but always keeping it real, far from the bullshit, the post truths and the fascist surveillance, far from a world which already collapsed but that refuses to expire because we are too distracted to watch it die. Life is out there, chasing storms and feeling the death. As Donoghue says: “I think we, in many maladaptive ways, have sought for surrender. And in many beautiful ways, sought surrender.”

Unfortunately, but also ironically, when the album came out Holland was serving a 30-day sentence for unknown charges. From the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic, from speedball to some accident to put you in jail for a month, artists installing windows for a living while a lot of others made money drawning in with both hands in their sound, a circle which closes, with all the elements of a story so unique and iconic to seem fake, which witnesses how SALEM have always been some of the rarest and realest cool kids in the game.

Last modified: December 3, 2020

Best of Witch House

Witch house became a genre by accident. Pictureplane's Travis Egedy made an ironic remark to the press about similarities in his sound with that of his contemporaries, including Modern Witch. As if conjured by black magic, Egedy's attempt at whimsy instantly entered the lexicon. Take screwed and chopped hip-hop, industrial noise, and shoegazey soundscapes, add one sarcastic comment, and a mini-movement is born.

11 Songs, 42 minutes

These samples help to further enhance the dark and mysterious nature of the genre. The genre became popular through online platforms such as Tumblr and SoundCloud, and its aesthetic is closely tied to internet subcultures, particularly the goth and witch communities. Visual elements, such as cryptic symbols, occult imagery, and glitched visuals, are often used in conjunction with the music to create a complete immersive experience.

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Salem witch house music has garnered a dedicated fan base and has had an influence on a number of other genres, including experimental electronic music, trap, and darkwave. Artists within the genre often collaborate and remix each other's work, creating a sense of community and pushing the boundaries of the genre even further. While Salem witch house music may not be widely known outside of its dedicated fan base, it continues to evolve and develop, with new artists experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what defines the genre. Its unique blend of dark and atmospheric sounds make it a captivating and immersive listening experience for those with an affinity for the occult and the macabre..

Reviews for "Beyond the Hocus Pocus: Immersing Yourself in Salem's Witch House Music Scene"

1. Jessica - 1 star

Unfortunately, I was highly disappointed with "Salem witch house music". As a fan of both electronic music and the Salem witch trials, I was excited to listen to this unique genre. However, the music was a chaotic mess of distorted sounds and eerie chants that seemed more like a random assortment of noises than a well-crafted musical experience. The lack of melody and structure made it difficult to enjoy or even understand what the artist was trying to convey. Overall, "Salem witch house music" failed to captivate me and left me feeling perplexed and unsatisfied.

2. Michael - 2 stars

Although I appreciate the effort to create a distinctive genre like "Salem witch house music," I found it to be too niche and inaccessible for my taste. The dark and eerie atmosphere is interesting as an experiment, but it lacks the depth and coherence that would make it enjoyable to listen to for an extended period. The repetitive beats and repetitive samples became monotonous after a while, and I couldn't find any redeeming qualities that would make me return to this genre. Perhaps this style will resonate with a specific audience, but it didn't speak to me personally.

3. Emily - 1 star

I have never been so bewildered by a genre of music like "Salem witch house music". The disorienting and abrasive nature of the music left my ears ringing and my head spinning. It felt like an assault on my senses, and I couldn't find any enjoyment or artistic value in this style. The lack of musicality and melody made it impossible for me to connect with the music on any level. I understand that it may be an acquired taste, but unfortunately, I won't be acquiring that taste anytime soon. "Salem witch house music" is definitely not for everyone, and it certainly wasn't for me.

4. David - 2 stars

While I appreciate the experimental nature of "Salem witch house music" and the attempt to create something unique, I couldn't fully immerse myself in this genre. The heavily distorted and dissonant sounds used in the music were jarring to my ears, and I found it challenging to find any semblance of rhythm or structure. It felt more like an exercise in noise than actual music. Although I can recognize the creativity in this genre, it simply wasn't enjoyable for me, and I prefer more conventional forms of electronic music.

Embracing the Shadows: A Guide to Salem's Witch House Music