Dopelord's first album is coming back. Season of Mist, the label the Polish band have just joined, reissues Magick Rites on 11 December, fourteen years after it came out.
Piotr Zin is refreshingly unsentimental about what it was. For most of the band it was their first time in a proper studio, in Bialystok, a room belonging to friends whose band they had already played gigs with. They recorded the songs mainly for themselves and expected nothing, with one practical exception: having a CD would make it easier to get booked.
Everything after that, he says, was completely unplanned. Six records later the band are one of the better known names in European stoner doom, which is the kind of career that makes a label want the back catalogue, and the kind that makes a debut hard to find.
The timing is not an accident either. The reissue lands while the band are out across Europe with Monolord, which is where a reissued debut actually sells. Nothing about the record has been reworked or expanded in the announcement: it is simply in print again.