Esben and the Witch
Older Terrors

"It's a northern country: cold climate, cold hearts too.
Cold, storm; fierce beasts in the forest. Life is harsh. The houses are wooden, dark and smoky inside. You can find the crude image of the Madonna behind a dripping candle, a pig's trotter hung to cure, a wreath of dried mushrooms. A bed, a table, a stool. These are difficult, miserable, brief lives.
For these people who live in the northern woods, the Devil is a real thing, no less than you, or me. More so; because they have never seen us and don't even know we exist, but they often see the Devil in the cemeteries, those eerie and sinister cities of the dead, where every grave is marked by the naive portrait of the deceased and there isn't a flower to put before it, because up there flowers don't grow, and so people make small votive offerings, little loaves, sometimes a sweet cake, which the bears, heavy with sleep, soon come to steal as they leave the forest margins. At midnight, especially on Walpurgis Night, the Devil invites the witches to his picnics among the graves; and then they dig up fresh corpses and eat them. Anyone can confirm it for you.
Garlic necklaces above the doors keep vampires away. If a blue-eyed child is born feet first on St. John's night, it is said they will become a seer. If they find a witch - some old woman who can ripen cheese when the neighbors can't, or whose black cat - horror! - always follows her, then they strip the hag and look for the signs, that third nipple to which the Demon sucks. They always find it. And then they kill her with stones.
Winter and biting cold.
Go to your grandmother who has been ill. Bring her the oat cakes I made for her on the hearthstone, and the bowl of butter. The good girl does as her mother tells her - it's a tiring five-mile walk through the forest; never leave the path, there are bears, boars, hungry wolves. Here, take your father's hunting knife: you already know how to use it.
The girl had a sheepskin coat to protect her from the cold, knew the forest too well to be afraid, but she knew she had to stay alert. When she heard the chilling howl of the wolf, she dropped her gifts, grabbed the knife, and lunged at the beast. It was enormous, with red eyes and gray dribbling jaws; only a mountaineer’s daughter could face it without dying of terror. The beast tried to bite her throat, as wolves do, but the girl met it with a wide slash of her blade and severed its right forepaw.
The beast let out a moan, almost a sob, when it realized what had happened: wolves are not as brave as they are thought. It limped away among the trees as best it could on its three remaining legs, leaving a trail of blood behind. The girl cleaned the knife blade well on her apron, wrapped the wolf's paw in the cloth her mother had used for the oat cakes, and proceeded towards her grandmother's house. Soon after, the snow fell so thick that it erased the path and with it all footprints, tracks, or other signs.
She found her grandmother so ill that she had taken to her bed, sunk into a restless sleep, moaning and trembling, and the granddaughter understood she had a fever. She felt her forehead with one hand: it was burning. She shook the cloth from the basket: she wanted to use it to make a cooling compress for her grandmother, and the wolf’s paw fell to the ground.
But it was no longer a wolf's paw. It was a hand severed at the wrist, a hand hardened from work and stained by years. There was a wedding ring on the ring finger and a wart on the index finger. From that, she recognized her grandmother's hand.
She pulled back the sheet and the woman awoke and immediately began thrashing and screaming like someone possessed. But the girl was strong, and armed with her father’s hunting knife, she managed to hold her grandmother still long enough to identify the cause of the fever. In place of the right hand, there was a bloody and already rotting stump.
The girl made the sign of the cross and screamed so loudly that the neighbors heard her and rushed to rescue her. They immediately recognized in the wart a witch’s nipple; the old woman, as she was, in her nightgown, was pushed out into the snow; with sticks, they drove her stumbling carcass to the edge of the forest, and there they stoned her to death.
Afterwards, the little girl lived happily ever after in her grandmother's house."

The process started in the previous 2014 work by the English band Esben and the Witch (hereafter referred to as EATW), through which they had shed their skin from their beginnings to highlight a new nature (namely, "A New Nature"), continues with this new album, even though the title seems to reconnect more to the ancient, the ancestral, the mystic, "Older Terrors".
We are talking about a trio from Brighton, creators of a strange and alienating musical mix, blending dream pop, old-fashioned post-punk and gothic, post-rock, ritualism, and songwriting, to release four long tracks that together construct a journey into nightmares. They are described as nightmare pop, and this definition fits perfectly. It's as if they transport us into the fairy tales told to us as children, except the ending is never as good as we remember, the forests are always dark and damp, populated by ghosts, witches, and monsters, and light rarely triumphs. Rachel's voice guides us with a trembling hand through these woods, it is a cold hand that sometimes slips away, disappears, and then we run to catch up with it again, not to lose this only anchor without which we would be as lost as abandoned children.
EATW create a magical and dark world, but at the same time welcoming: these four tracks have a slow pace, needing to grow and mature in intensity to unleash their full potential, but the hypnotic and nerve-wracking wait will be rewarded by an album of great evocative power.

Text taken from Angela Carter, "The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories"