Charlotte Wessels has released Incubus, the first song from Mute Swan Empire, which arrives on 5 February 2027.
Fifteen songs, fifteen characters, one each. Wessels has built the record as a set of archetypes, every one of them a different way of reacting to a world that feels like it is ending, and together they are meant to add up to a portrait of people under pressure rather than a story with a plot.
Incubus belongs to the Insomniac. The song takes its image from Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare, the one with the demon squatting on a sleeping woman's chest, and Wessels describes a character lying under that weight wearing a mask made of everything she is afraid of.
What saves it from being only bleak is the line she quotes: you cannot break what is already broken, you cannot burn what is made of fire. Endurance as a form of power is a harder idea to write than despair.
This is a full band record rather than a solo one, and the band now has a name of its own, The Obsession, taken from her 2024 album. Four of them played in Delain with her.