Matt Talbott of Hum recorded The Arsonist fully analog, and no computer touched it until the mix. That choice sits on top of everything else. 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. Storms has been blunt about it: the album is a shot at overproduced music, and it earns the stance by sounding like it means it.
For most of their decade in Durham, North Carolina, WAILIN STORMS have worn the Southern gothic rock tag, and the swampy blues and preacher's-son fatalism make it an easy fit. What the label slides past is the post-punk underneath. The Nick Cave lineage the band trade in never stopped at the Bad Seeds — it ran back to the scrape and clatter of The Birthday Party — and on this fifth album, their first for Season of Mist, that nervier strain pulls as hard as the dark-country side the promo prefers to name.
"Dead End" opens the album and works as a map of it. The bluesy menace, the lurch into distortion without warning — it's all there in the first four minutes, which makes the opener the cleanest answer to what this Texas-born, Durham-based band sound like now. The title track puts their dynamics on show: "The Arsonist" swings calm, bluesy stretches against harsher distorted guitar and lives in the gap between the two. Closing the record, "It's All Dark Now Where Your Eyes Used to Be" — its longest song — settles onto a piano figure that's calmer and slower but no lighter for it. The volume drops. The dark doesn't.
Storms painted the cover himself: one house burning in the surrounding black, about as subtle as the songs it wraps. Sit with it after dark — that's the room this record was built for.
Release: 10 July 2026
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Promo provided by Season of Mist.
The Arsonist (Official Video)