Witch house is a music genre that emerged in the late 2000s. It is often characterized by its dark and haunting sound, combining elements of electronic music, hip-hop, and industrial. The genre's name is derived from the imagery and symbolism associated with witchcraft, as well as the mellow and eerie atmosphere that the music creates. Witch house artists often utilize slowed-down and distorted vocals, atmospheric synths, and heavy percussion to create a sense of unease and mystery. The music is known for its deep and atmospheric production techniques, with layered and textured sounds that create a surreal and otherworldly experience for the listener. The genre rose to prominence on the internet, particularly on social media platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube.
Remember Witch House?
Witch house was a joke — literally. “2009 was the beginning of the ‘witch house’ style,” Travis Egedy — the Denver-based producer who makes distorted dance music as Pictureplane — told Pitchfork at the end of that year. “Mark our words, 2010 will be straight up witchy.” In the brief blurb, Egedy big-upped several artists in his creative circle as indicative of the witch house aesthetic, a sign at the time that this newly emerged subgenre of electronic music was actually a real thing; a year later, he was singing a different and decidedly un-occult tune. “It was never meant to be an actual genre,” he claimed to The A.V. Club at the close of 2010. “It was a half-assed conceptual joke that really turned into something real.”
Indeed, similar to chillwave — the sneakily influential subgenre of electronic pop that was coined by Carles of the defunct joking-not-joking Hipster Runoff blog and emerged concurrently to witch house’s brief run — witch house went from a goofy joke to a real-deal musical movement practically overnight. The existence of the subgenre was spectral in its brevity, lasting no more than 18 months before most of its practitioners disappeared off the map or moved onto different sounds and styles. The music itself was slight, with few actual lasting works of relevance beyond Midwestern trio Salem’s 2010 debut LP King Night — released 10 years ago today — and the creation of Tri Angle, Robin Carolan’s left-of-center electronic label that shuttered its doors earlier this year.
But beyond a few scattered points of legacy, the micro-phenomenon that was witch house is instructive in understanding how musical trends disseminated in the waning days of indie’s music blog era. Witch house’s aesthetic was established and strictly adhered to from its inception: slowed-down hip-hop rhythms that took direct inspiration from the syrupy sound of late Houston pioneer DJ Screw, glowy synths often ripped directly from trance music and rave culture, the occasional sound effect (i.e. the gunshots that punctuated NYC duo White Ring’s 2010 single “IxC999″), vocals rendered unintelligible either by way of delivery or aural obfuscation.
There were a few indirect precedents for witch house’s sound: the harshed-buzz gothic electro of Crystal Castles, the hauntological techno released by labels like Sandwell District and Modern Love (especially the latter imprint’s founding act Demdike Stare), and the ever-present influence of UK decayed-rave maestro Burial. But Salem’s influence loomed larger on witch house’s pale shadow than any other artist. Arguably, witch house itself wouldn’t have existed at all without them; despite Egedy’s initial coinage of the phrase, few (if any) acts that deigned to adopt the genre tag made records that reflected his punk-ish rave music, instead attempting their own alchemic concoction from Salem’s aural recipe.
Band members Jack Donoghue, Heather Marlatt, and John Holland began attracting underground attention through early EPs released on the typically indie-pop-focused Acéphale imprint, as 2008’s Yes I Smoke Crack and Water from the following year established the sound that the trio would crystallize on King Night. A fascinating and often beautiful amalgam of synth-pop, trance, and hip-hop motifs, the actual music on King Night was largely overshadowed by the controversy they often attracted. There were the terrible live performances, the botched New York Times interviews, and above all else the stench of cultural appropriation that arose from three white artists jacking the aural traditions of hip-hop and, at times, pitching their own voices to a low register.
A few factors (hip-hop and R&B becoming the dominant popular musical genres in the US, an increase in the diversity of music writers in the mid-2010s following decades of the form having been dominated by white men) contributed to the topic of cultural appropriation overshadowing the last decade of pop-cultural analysis. But Salem were arguably the first white act in the 2010s to kick off discussion of the ever-relevant issue, and that’s where the trio’s legacy begins and ends. “Never think of this band again,” Christopher Weingarten implored in a Village Voice blog post naming King Night’s “Trapdoor” one of the worst songs of 2010. “I assume [it] won’t be the hardest thing come 2011.” Indeed, after an EP the following year — I’m Still In The Night, which featured a straightforward (for them, anyway) cover of Alice Deejay’s “Better Off Alone” — Salem more or less disappeared for the rest of the decade.
There were a few scattered remixes for the Cult and German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, and Donoghue nabbed a production credit on “Black Skinhead,” a single from Kanye West’s abrasive 2013 LP Yeezus — but otherwise the band remained an inactive concern until re-emerging at the top of this May with a new mix, STAY DOWN, for internet radio station NTS Radio, and releasing a Drain Gang-esque new single “Starfall” complete with footage of the band’s members engaging in some Twister-style storm-chasing.
King Night also marked the end of witch house as an existent genre that artists contributed to. The album’s release had the inverse effect of the oft-cited legend surrounding the Velvet Underground’s first album, as the overall proliferation of off-brand attempts to bottle their magic flatlined almost immediately. The evidence for this is largely anecdotal: During the genre’s lifespan, I ran Pitchfork’s Tracks section, which in its earliest inception served to cherry-pick up-and-coming artists that were highlighted on other music blogs, along with the occasional user submission that passed muster. Pre-King Night, my inbox was flooded with upstart bedroom-production hopefuls barely masking their mimicry, with unpronounceable, Wingdings-esque band names or overly on-the-nose monikers like Mater Suspiria Vision.
But in the months that followed the album’s release, the frequency of similar-sounding submissions became slower than a witch house producer’s BPM of choice; by the middle of 2011, bedroom producers had moved on to attempting replications of James Blake’s dubstep-infused singer-songwriter pop, crystallized on his self-titled debut released at the top of that year. And even though some of witch house’s more notable practitioners kept at it regardless (White Ring remained an active concern with a few different lineups, and their founding vocalist Kendra Malia passed away last year), other entities involved in the genre’s sole wave moved on quickly — including Carolan’s Tri Angle imprint, which featured witch house practitioners like oOoOO (pronounced “oh”), Holy Other, and Balam Acab on some of its earliest releases.
Prior to Tri Angle’s inception, Carolan wrote for 20jazzfunkgreats, a music blog known for highlighting dark, challenging electronic music new and old. More so than their contemporaries, the site and its writers maintained a healthier curiosity beyond mere trend-chasing impulses. And that willingness to break beyond genre carried over to Tri Angle’s curatorial approach, setting it apart from witch house-adjacent imprints of the era like Disaro and Pendu Sound and carrying it to greater success than its peers.
Besides releasing seminal albums from left-of-center artists like How To Dress Well, the Haxan Cloak, and Forest Swords, Tri Angle often flirted with mainstream pop right as mainstream pop’s figureheads started looking towards indie culture. Artists on its roster collaborated with artists ranging from Kanye and A$AP Rocky to Björk and Khalid. At least one of their associated acts became out-and-out pop stars: UK pop duo AlunaGeorge, whose hit single “You Know You Like It” was the title track of their 2012 EP released by the label before moving onto major-label territory.
The fact that Tri Angle achieved a lasting longevity at all seems like a minor miracle when considering the ephemera of the internet culture in which it rose from, and its closing in April felt like the end of an era that had regardless long ceased to exist. Alongside chillwave, the micro-phenomenon of witch house as a logged-on DIY movement has since been unreplicated within indie culture, with much of the grassroots musical movements of the late 2010s taking place squarely in hip-hop’s SoundCloud-situated axis. (The chill-adjacent vaporwave culture comes close, but still hasn’t yet achieved the level of mass music press saturation that chillwave and witch house were awarded.)
That doesn’t necessarily mean the sensation is impossible to replicate, however — on the contrary, we’re more situated for something similar to emerge than ever before. As I theorized last year, both chillwave and witch house emerged from the wake of young people recovering from what was then the biggest economic collapse of their collective lifetime. Structural and direct violence were more visible and normalized through the digital age, jobs were nowhere to be found, and many just-out-of-college post-adolescents found themselves at home with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and sparse wealth beyond what their own imaginations might conjure. Sound familiar? It’s unlikely that whatever musical movement that emerges from the age of COVID-19 will even remotely resemble witch house’s confines — but the micro-movement’s spirit just may well come to haunt us again.
Got any witch house? Why I'm on the genre-mongers' side
T here are two kinds of music fan – those who get excited by new genres and those who treat them with disdain. Back in the 90s the UK music press was notorious for its addiction to micro-scenes and flags of convenience – fraggle, new grave, collision pop. Some were absurd, some were successful, some were both. (When the internet came along, it was rather a shock to find that America had taken shoegazing seriously for years.)
Musicians themselves would often chafe at the suggestion that they were anything other than fearless trailblazers, but I was always on the genre-mongers' side. Not just because they made following music more entertaining, but because there's something fascinating about seeing different people work through the same basic idea. Being part of a movement – even an invented one – gave you a more interesting context to explore or break from.
I spent an afternoon this week listening to Salem's recent I Buried My Heart Inna Wounded Knee mixtape, an example of "witch house". My curiosity as a casual listener had been piqued by talk of something intriguingly queasy: slowed-down hip-hop beats, crude electronics, nerve-jangling samples and bad-dream sounds. I got exactly that – I also got a lesson in how genres work today.
Researching a new genre nowadays means following other people's breadcrumb trails of discovery: the first thing you realise is that you're always a latecomer. A search for witch house pulled up a Drowned in Sound forum thread from May, linking back to blog posts from February, then taking in new references across the summer. All these links, and the thread itself, brought me hours of music very quickly, and a sinking feeling that I was missing the point.
The problem is that idea of the "casual listener". On my brief quest for witch house, I'd also found plenty of sceptics. Some engaged with the music and scene, and their criticisms were fascinating. Others were less useful. They were simply genrephobes: always ready with a damning dismissal or the evergreen accusation "emperor's new clothes". Implicit in their criticism of new genres is a sense that the music couldn't stand up on its own without its supporting context. But this seems unfair if the music isn't trying to. Stripping music of context, after all, is what MP3 culture has been so good at – unbundling albums, making music of every culture and time available to be dropped willy-nilly onto an iPod playlist. It's been liberating, but a backlash is no surprise.
Artificial scarcity is one way of restoring context to music – releasing it on non-digital formats, or never recording certain tracks. In the case of witch house, the scene's penchant for non-Googleable names (oOoOO or Gr†ll Gr†ll) may be an attempt to create scarcity. But all it means is that pages about the scene as a whole end up higher in the rankings – witch house is still very findable.
Perhaps the strange names work as signposts, not barriers. Scarcity isn't the only way to revalue music, another is to present it as part of a total aesthetic, free but immersive. Witch house comes across as a curatorial genre – the syrupy, drained and hacked-apart music only as important as the night-time photography, the treated found videos, the ritualised typography. Insisting on separating the music from everything else is like judging a gallery installation from the brochure photographs.
That is why witch house isn't for the casual listener – not because it's hard to find, or expensive, or particularly "difficult", but because it requires a certain sacrifice of reserve, maybe even of dignity: you buy into it whole or not at all. In that sense it fits its horror trappings perfectly – a ghost story requires exactly the same willingness to be affected. You might still come away thinking it's rubbish – aesthetics can be poorly realised or fundamentally flawed, after all (and ghost stories not scary). But what witch house tells me is that genres now aren't exercises in innovation or marketing, so much as ways of framing an experience. And if you won't feel open to that experience, your investigation of it won't get far.
Revisiting witch house
When I first wrote about witch house, I was under the impression that it was on its way out. Either it never went away, or we’re in the second wave of it, because I’ve come across a bunch of new artists in that style lately. This second take on the genre has afforded me the opportunity to describe it better than I did the first time, as well as the chance to share some more artists laden with ridiculous unicode band and track names. I didn’t really hone in on any particular group of artists this time, although I did come across a couple favorites. Thus, this post will be more free form than usual, and I’ll address both the artists I enjoyed as well as my take on this genre relative to the mainstream.
The first order of business is the new, refined definition of witch house, in my own words. It seems to me, now, to be a slow, dark, dreary variant of RnB. The doom metal of hip-hop, you might say. It is reminiscent of a lot of artists you may know: an immediately obvious example is Lil B. The interesting thing about that is that at least part of Lil B’s iconic “based” sound was curated by an artist named Clams Casino, who is at least partly considered a witch house producer. I’m God is one of his works. The more obvious RnB elements in witch house remind me of artists like The Weeknd, whose music I discussed previously.
What the genre has that sets it apart is a very deranged, sometimes evil feel to it. The tracks go all over the place, with disquieting melodies and alien sampling, making for tones designed to feel disturbing. I think it’s something one can get used to, and much more simply done than trying to get used to straight up noise or other more abstract genres. Witch house is grounded by its solid beats and basslines, which, as mentioned before, have a vaguely RnB groove to them. Still, you are likely to hear some weird stuff from some of these artists.
One of my less ridiculous finds of this experience was Mathbonus. I mean it: compared to some artists (we’re getting there), Mathbonus is a real straight shooter. His tracks are melodic, subdued, and very pleasant. As we hear in Orchid, that doesn’t mean his tracks are boring. He throws in the right amount of variety to keep the track going, and he does this solidly in all the tracks I’ve heard by him. Old Habits is a tremendously well-done experimental ambient track, and he also has more standard ambient tracks like There Is Light In Us. My actual favorite track by Mathbonus (and possibly even in the genre, at the moment) is Fog. It’s one of those “everything done just right” tracks, with the heavily modulated samples, the slightly unconventional beat, and the slow crescendoing effect of the track as a whole. Hearing this track on accident was one of the reasons I decided to listen to more witch house again.
On the somewhat more ridiculous end of the spectrum, we have artists like Crim3s and Gvcci Hvcci. Crim3s sounds a LOT like Crystal Castles, and you’ll get what I’m saying after listening to Still Goin’. I will say about them, and that track, they have good production. It makes me wonder how it would sound if I had a good sound system in here. if you can get used to the high-pitched yelling/squeaking, the music is carries itself well.
As for Gvcci Hvcci, I don’t really know what to say. I share his (I think it’s safe to assume it’s a guy) music for educational purposes. BLOWIN UP is the first track I heard by Gvcci Hvcci. The vocals sound like a mix of Ke$ha and Kitty Pryde, if one of them decided to make a track while really high. Crack the Whip is not much different, in that respect. If you’re into this, then welcome to the genre. It just wouldn’t be a witch house article if I didn’t bring back something weird.
Nor would it be a witch house article if I didn’t start bringing in the special characters. Cue another one of my favorite finds: Summer of Haze. I’m usually nervous when artists start to roll out the ▲’s, but ▲s Love By Effect ,▲s Blowjob By Feelings is a stunning track that caught my attention immediately. When it cut out at 1:49, I thought that my phone had skipped tracks. It is criminally short for how much promise it has, but it is great nonetheless. He treats the vocal samples as an instrument (or at least I hope that was the plan, because I have no idea what they’re saying), and the beat is well-chosen. The track has a very sick sense of groove because of it. Another strong track is Insomni▲. An interesting thing I found by Summer of Haze is a remix of Tupac’s Hail Mary, entitled Come With Me, Hail Mary. This is one of those songs that you wouldn’t expect to hear a cover of, much less a compelling one, but I think Summer of Haze has managed to pull a new layer out of it.
I’ve listened to a substantial amount of music in a genre called future garage. It’s kind of a broad genre, but I think most artists have got a “sound vaguely like Burial” thing going on. It is a chill genre, like witch house, and I can hear some overlap, such as silly, naive, unfinished by Haapa. My point is that I see the future of pop music drawing from one or both of these two genres. Dubstep’s time in the spotlight is likely coming to a close, and I think the next producer looking for something edgy that hasn’t quite been tried before is going to look to artists like those in this thread, or in the future garage threads.
Of the two, witch house is possibly the more accessible, because it is so similar to RnB in terms of beat selection. Future garage is much more about coming up with unusual beats, and I don’t see that taking off in the mainstream, which seems to always be dance-oriented. The really eery/grungy sounds of witch house have proven themselves to go well with standard beats, and that could be what it takes to break through. We’ve already got artists who put $’s in their names, so why not a ▼ or two? When you hear the likes of Люби меня, люби! by ɪɲ ʕʰɘɼɾʏ ɟȺɱɨʟʮ on the radio, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The genre rose to prominence on the internet, particularly on social media platforms such as Tumblr and YouTube. Many witch house artists cultivated an aesthetic and visual style that was closely aligned with the music, incorporating occult symbolism, glitch art, and lo-fi visuals into their music videos and album artwork. The lyrics of witch house songs often touch on themes of the occult, spirituality, and mysticism.
However, they can also explore personal and emotional themes, often in a cryptic and abstract manner. Witch house has gained a relatively small but dedicated following, with fans appreciating the genre's unique blend of dark atmospheres, experimental production techniques, and evocative imagery. The genre has also influenced and been influenced by other related genres, such as darkwave, trap, and shoegaze, resulting in a diverse and evolving sound. Overall, witch house is a genre that embraces the dark and supernatural, blending electronic and experimental elements to create a haunting and atmospheric musical experience. Its unique sound and visual style have made it a distinct and intriguing genre within the broader electronic music landscape..
Reviews for "The Witch House Experience: What to Expect at a Live Show"
1. John - 2 stars
I really didn't enjoy the witch house music genre at all. The slow, repetitive beats and distorted vocals just didn't appeal to me. I found it difficult to get into the music and it just sounded like a bunch of random noises put together. It lacked melody and structure, which made it hard to connect with. Overall, it was a disappointing listening experience for me.
2. Sarah - 1 star
I tried giving the witch house music genre a chance, but I really couldn't find anything enjoyable about it. The heavy use of samples and manipulated sounds made it feel chaotic and disorganized. The murky and lo-fi production quality added to the overall unpleasantness of the music. The lack of discernible lyrics or meaningful vocals made it even harder to connect with the songs. It's just not my cup of tea, and I won't be listening to it again.
3. David - 2 stars
I'm not sure what all the hype is about with witch house music. I couldn't find any standout tracks or memorable moments in the songs I listened to. The overall sound was monotonous and lacked depth. The heavy use of reverb and distortion felt like a lazy attempt to create an eerie atmosphere. I prefer music with more substance and variety, and unfortunately, witch house music didn't deliver on that front for me.
4. Emily - 1 star
I found witch house music to be grating and unlistenable. The distorted and muffled sounds made it almost painful to listen to. The lack of melody or catchy hooks made it difficult to stay engaged with the songs. It felt like an experimental genre that was trying too hard to be edgy and different. Overall, I couldn't find anything enjoyable or redeeming in witch house music, and it's not something I would recommend to others.
5. Alex - 2 stars
Witch house music just didn't click with me. The overly dark and gloomy atmosphere didn't resonate with my taste in music. The slow tempo and repetitive beats became monotonous after a while. The genre lacked any sort of energy or excitement that I look for in music. It felt like a niche genre that only appeals to a specific group of listeners, but unfortunately, I didn't find it appealing at all.