Esben and the Witch

Drawing its moniker from a Danish fairy tale, Esben and the Witch produces evocative soundscapes that fuse the fragile elegance of folk and shoegaze with metal’s raw force. Although the trio’s opening full-length Violet Cries from 2011 displayed clear debts to goth and post-rock, the group soon broadened its reach and increased its volume, bringing greater density to A New Nature, the 2014 album engineered by Steve Albini. While emphasizing the heavier side of their palette, Esben and the Witch conveyed it with considerable subtlety, offsetting crushing riffs against the clear singing of Rachel Davies throughout the expansive 2016 suite Older Terrors, injecting punk defiance into 2018’s Nowhere, and pairing introspection with release on the spare 2023 set Hold Sacred.

Esben and the Witch came together in 2008 after guitarist and keyboardist Thomas Fisher relocated to Brighton and began collaborating with keyboardist and drummer Daniel Copeman. Once the pair chose to share their developing material publicly, they invited longtime friend Rachel Davies to handle vocals and bass. The three issued their debut EP 33 on their own in 2009 and followed it with the single “Lucia, At the Precipice,” issued by Too Pure as a limited 7" the next year. In May of 2010 they supplied the track “Corridors” from 33 as the soundtrack for an installation by Karl Sadler at the London edition of the Creators Project. Later that year Matador Records signed the band and put out the single Marching Song in October; December brought a place on the long list for the BBC’s Sound of 2011. Violet Cries, their goth-inflected debut album, appeared the following January to widespread praise and reached number 13 on the U.K. Indie Chart.

To compose material for the second album, Esben and the Witch withdrew to a cottage in East Sussex during 2012. Davies wrote every lyric, drawing from the work of Robert Frost and Vladimir Nabokov. Working with co-producer Tom Morris, the band tracked Wash the Sins Not Only the Face and released it in early 2013. That July they performed a live score for the film La Antena at the East End Film Festival.

In 2014 the trio departed Matador to launch their own imprint, Nostromo, and issued a split EP with Thought Forms. They recorded September’s A New Nature with engineer Steve Albini, capturing the growing weight of their sound and prompting comparisons to Swans and PJ Harvey. A relocation to Berlin spurred further shifts on Older Terrors, a November 2016 Season of Mist release comprising four extended pieces that merged metal, prog, and post-rock. After the 2017 concert album Live at Roadburn, Esben and the Witch returned the next year with Nowhere, which folded punk-derived riffs into their expansive style. Work on the subsequent album began in mid-2019 when they wrote songs in the Italian countryside and refined them over the following two years while staying in Portugal, France, and Germany. Tracked in four days, Hold Sacred arrived in May 2023, matching meditative, personal reflections on endurance with raw yet atmospheric playing that echoed A New Nature. That same year the band resumed live performances, including an appearance at the Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands.