WAILIN STORMS have premiered their fifth album, "The Arsonist," in full ahead of its Friday, July 10, 2026 release via Season of Mist — the Durham, North Carolina band's first album for the label.
Decibel Magazine is hosting the stream two full days before release, writing that the nine songs "don't feel buffed, corrected or sanded down... They feel scorched."
"I've always been fascinated by fire," WAILIN STORMS vocalist and guitarist Justin Storms said. "It speaks to our inherent attraction to danger and annihilation, but also, our hope for transformation." As a child in Corpus Christi, Texas, Storms says he came dangerously close to accidentally burning down his family's house — an obsession that traces a direct line to the new record.
The band recorded "The Arsonist" fully analog with Matt Talbott of HUM, returning to the raw, four-track roots WAILIN STORMS started with. "Some of these songs are more primitive and stripped down, hearkening back to the four-track recordings that the band started with," Storms said. "The recordings contain flaws but remain human in all the right ways. They could be a murder ballad or an old folk song that's sung around the campfire."
The record filters Southern Gothic imagery — old folk songs, Baptist hymns, Flannery O'Connor, René Magritte — through noisy, bluesy rock. Opener "Dead End," previously released as a single, takes a Lynchian post-punk turn, while "The Wind" blows loud enough, in the band's words, "to wake the entire cemetery." On the slow-burning title track, Storms sings, "Like the wind controls the sea, you always had a hold on me."
"The Arsonist" has already drawn praise from Brooklyn Vegan, CVLT Nation, Treble and Decibel ahead of release. We gave the album 8/10 in our review, praising its unpolished honesty: "The guitars keep their grain, the takes keep their flaws, nothing is buffed down — and for a band this deep in dread, the roughness reads as honesty rather than a pose."
Order & Stream: Full album stream at Decibel Magazine · Pre-order & Pre-save