Show No Mercy explores the realms of metal, hard rock, and other extreme styles.

Embed is unavailable.

Bell Witch offer a beautifully spare take on funeral doom—the Seattle duo's music is melancholic, heavy, slow, beyond minimal. It evokes burial. If someone close to you has died, you know that mourning can be a lonely and suffocating experience: Bell Witch, who named themselves after a poltergeist from Southern folklore, evoke these sorts of feelings.

Balancing extreme dynamic shifts from hushed whispers to punishingly loud crashes, they leave space for outside sounds to creep in and aren't afraid to incorporate silence. The band’s setup itself is unique: both bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Adrian Guerra also sing—and when I say "sing," imagine ghosts howling and growling against the wind.

The band’s first album, Longing, was an elegantly spacious 64-minute trek into dark, fragile lamenting. As Andy O'Connor put it in his Pitchfork review: "[It's] like Om learning of a terminal illness diagnosis." Bell Witch's new record, Four Phantoms, was produced by Billy Anderson (Pallbearer, Sleep, Melvins, High on Fire, Red House Painters), and it's bigger and sturdier: The record is gut-wrenching and cathartic in the way the saddest things can be.

Of all the bands mentioned in that parenthetical after Anderson's name, the most useful here might be Mark Kozelek’s ‘90s slowcore group Red House Painters. Bell Witch’s music is much heavier and darker, but both have an endless isolation to them—a crystalline look at solitude and quiet suffering. All of it can be heard on the new track "Judgement, In Fire: I – Garden (Of Blooming Ash)", which I'm premiering above; at 10 minutes, it's Four Phantoms' shortest track.

I reached out to Desmond to learn more about the new album, one of my favorites of 2015 thus far. We ended up talking a lot about ghosts.