NIGHT HAG have premiered "Drowned In Death" at No Clean Singing, the second track to surface from "Great Dismal Darkness" — the Richmond, Virginia band's second full-length, out October 16 via Rotted Life Records.
At 7:59 it is the longest thing on the record and its opening statement, which tells you what the band want you to brace for. This is not a death metal album that happens to slow down. It is a record built at crawling speed on purpose: lumbering dirges, slow-motion double-kick thunder, walls of rotten distortion and vocals that sound like they are coming up through standing water.
"Great Dismal Darkness" is NIGHT HAG's first album since 2022's "Phantasmal Scourge" and the first they have made as a four-piece — Sam Fox on vocals and bass, Jon Ransom on drums and vocals, Casey Williams and Joe Arida on guitars. Seven tracks, no gimmicks and no polish, the label promises, and on the evidence of the premiere that is not marketing hedging.
The title is doing local work. The Great Dismal Swamp is a real place, a vast waterlogged expanse in southeastern Virginia, and the band have written the album that geography deserves — equal parts primitive death metal, fetid doom and something genuinely swamp-born. Track five is called "Strange Whispers From Beneath The Cypress". Track six, "The Terrible Old Woman", flips the title of H.P. Lovecraft's 1920 story "The Terrible Old Man".
The band have been at this since 2010, working through the "Insemination Rites Of The Succubus" EP, split LPs with CRYPTIC BROOD and BURIAL, and "Phantasmal Scourge". What is new here is not the filth but the patience — the new material is slower, thicker and more suffocating than anything they have put out, and it trades the genre's usual velocity for pressure.
The cover, a sleep-paralysis tableau of a hag crouched over a sleeping figure, comes from Fred Grabosky of Form Terror Growth; the logo is the work of David Mikkelsen of UNDERGANG. The album was recorded and mixed at Yave Rust Recording, with mixing and mastering by Bob Greenough at Not For The Weak Records.
The first single, "Effluvia Tendrils", is already out. Hear "Drowned In Death" in full at the No Clean Singing premiere.
Tracklist:
- Drowned In Death (7:59)
- Effluvia Tendrils (6:00)
- It Came Back The Next Night (6:42)
- Staring Into The Ancient Chasm (6:09)
- Strange Whispers From Beneath The Cypress (6:06)
- The Terrible Old Woman (5:08)
- Excoriate (5:06)
Order & Stream Great Dismal Darkness: Bandcamp