Description

Pacific Northwestern doom metal monolith Bell Witch is releasing their new album Future s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate. For this new album, bassist vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch s bounds. Like 2017 s lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track-a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future s Shadow.

While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over Mirror Reaper and Bell Witch s 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Stygian Bough Volume 1, The Clandestine Gate drew those instruments closer to the center of it s compositions. The band reunited with their longtime producer Billy Anderson as they began negotiating these new compositional weights. On this latest, the band s twinned voices build off of the chantlike textures of previous records while steering toward more developed melodic lines, structured harmonies, and rhythmic death metal growls. The immense gravity of a work like The Clandestine Gate, which features exclusive stunning cover art by Jordi Diaz Alama, allows ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive-not just a philosophical exercise, but an embodied truth. By slowing down both their creative process and the tempo of the music itself, Bell Witch digs even deeper into their long standing focus: the way life spills on inside it s minuscule container, both eternal and fleeting, a chord that echoes without resolution.