Private Space, the group’s third album, is a previously untapped vibe at the heart of The Indications.
She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap-one that tightens the more you struggle. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe.
One of the year’s most ambitious recordings, Primordial Arcana cements WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM’s legacy as one of US Black Metal’s most daring, unique, and quintessential bands. An album born out of the DIY ethos, Primordial Arcana proves to be the band’s most genuine and focused. Always uncompromising, Primordial Arcana sees WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM stay true to their unique vision. In fact, Primordial Arcana is the first WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM record in which Kody was a part of the writing process from the start, so it benefits from his background in cosmic funeral doom.
Meanwhile, “Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)” is an explosion of cosmic grandeur, a symphonic rendering of the hermetic maxim As above, so below as envisioned by Keyworth. “Spirit of Lightning” returns briefly to the earthly plane as a tribute to the human connections forged in music. Leadoff track “Mountain Magick” sets the august tone with alpine guitar melodies cresting skyward in triumph.
The album’s title is a reference to the band’s ongoing reach back to the most ancient, archetypal energies. Primordial Arcana is the band’s first completely self-contained work: In addition to composition and performance, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver alongside guitarist Kody Keyworth handled all aspects of recording, producing and mixing at their own Owl Lodge Studios in the woods of Washington state. Two decades into their journey as ritualistic black metal conjurers, WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM have emerged from the forest with Primordial Arcana, their most majestic album to date, and their first release via Relapse Records.