Witchpit The Weight of Death

Witchpit Pay "The Blackened Fee" For Hell-Tinged Sludge Metal (Video Premiere)


Witchpit are either a sludge band masquerading as a classic rock act or a 70s stoner band who smoked themselves into a coma and woke in New Orleans sometime in the 1990s. Either way, the band’s (who actually reside in South Carolina) gruff new single “The Blackened Fee” is refreshing, and we’re premiering the video for it here. Check it out below and prepare for their debut album The Weight of Death to drop early next year.

“The Blackened Fee” posits an alternative interpretation to the hazy plains where stoner metal and sludge metal usually meet. Instead of filling the riffs with smoke, Witchpit look back and pull from genre progenitors to saunter with mid-range guitars. They cruise through “The Blackened Fee” with the carefree cantor of a self-assured stoner. However, they differentiate themselves from the hordes of other legacy-minded bands with their distraught vocals. It’s a stimulating reversal of the regular formula; a flipping of the regular “heavy riffs with big vocals” script for the inverse. They’re both immediate and weightier than any other aspect of the mix, calling to mind heady post-metal and sludge metal bands of the 1980s and 1990s.

In that sense, Witchpit’s vocals are the harshest element of “The Blackened Fee,” not solely because of their gruffness. The backmasked whispers that rise during the song’s midpoint are more cerebral than the surrounding breakdown. Yet, the way Witchpit marry muscularity with erudite urgency slot them as a band who, instead of hunkering down on harsh doom riffs with operatic vocals, use their vocals to carry all dismay with the instrumentals surge.

The Weight of Death releases March 25 via Heavy Psych Sounds (EU pre-order here).