We started out wanting this to be a really experimental, odd time signatures, really heavy, very hard to listen to album.
Chris Howorth, Blabbermouth, 27 August 2026
That album does not exist. What turned up instead is a big, lit, theatrical rock record with two excellent songs bolted to the front of it, and Howorth gave the reason away in the same interview: the band tried so hard to be bold that it had to pull back and stop being bold. So forget the difficult version. The question is whether the one that got made earns its stage.
The quintet built around Maria Brink's voice, In This Moment, released Witch on 28 August 2026 through Better Noise Music, the first album for the label and the ninth of the band's life, eleven tracks and forty nine minutes cut across two production desks, Kane Churko on eight of them and Drew Fulk on three, with Chris Howorth and Randy Weitzel on guitars, Travis Johnson on bass and Kent Diimmel on drums and programming. The last one was Godmode, in 2023. It went to thirteen on the British rock and metal chart and thirty two on the American album sales chart. That is the paperwork.
Think of a record like this as stage machinery. Cues, a trapdoor, a costume change in the dark, a rig that either comes down on the beat or comes down on somebody's head. The first two cues here fire exactly on time. "Shame" is the pyro: the heaviest guitar sound on the album, a chorus torn off its frame and thrown at you, and the one track here that never has to defend itself. Nothing else hits that hard. The title line lands as an accusation lifted off the accuser and handed straight back, which is the idea the whole album is built on, and this is the only place it arrives with a guitar behind it. Brink is enormous on it, and she is enormous on most of this.
"Crawl" is the other one that fires. It is the industrial track, synths welded to the drums rather than laid over them, hydraulic and cold, and it is written for a floor rather than for headphones. It is also the plainest, least decorated song here, which is exactly why it is the heaviest. Two songs in, this sounds like the best record the band has made in years. Some of it still sounds like the band that made Blood. Most of it does not, and the distance between those two sentences is the album.
The rig comes down on the beat twice, and then somebody in the dark spends twenty minutes hunting for the next costume.
Then the middle. "I Want to Believe" brings in Rory Rodriguez of Dayseeker and splits the room harder than anything else on the record. It is meant as the big anthem and it arrives as the outline of one. The guest pairing is the part worth keeping. The song under it is built like a single and behaves like one, and a chorus that size should leave more than this behind it. "Heretic" has a quieter problem. It is the shortest thing here at just over three minutes, and the Kim Dracula spot does very little for it: a guest turn that arrives, does its bit and leaves the song exactly where it found it.
"Father" is the save. It is the slow one that works, emotive with no gimmick anywhere near it, and it pulls at something the rest of the slow half only gestures at. Lump it in with the filler if you like. Whatever else sags in the middle of this record, that song has a reason to be on it.
The album ends on two covers and they do not land the same way. Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall", with Kat Von D on it, is the rig coming down on somebody's head. It is instantly recognisable, it is dressed up with some care, and it is still where this album loses half the room. Count it against: it dilutes everything personal the record had built up, and a song that famous did not need this band half as much as this band wanted it. The Nine Inch Nails closer, "Something I Can Never Have", is the opposite call: nearly seven minutes, the longest piece here, and it puts back the rawness the Floyd cover spent.
So: good, uneven, and the two best songs are better than the album holding them. If you want this band loud and lit, "Shame", "Crawl" and "Father" are worth your money and a fair slice of the rest is stage business between cues. Covers on a studio album usually make me nervous, and here one earns its place and one does not. Skip Witch and you will not have missed the year. Play those first two back to back and you will wonder what the hard, experimental album would have sounded like. Somebody should still make it.