Funeral Witchery are releasing Beyond the Light, their first album, after a demo and four singles put out on their own.
"Death will take you. Hell will keep you" is the line the band put at the centre of what they do, and the record does not spend long establishing the tone. "Sheol" gathers atmosphere and then breaks it, "Wolfqueen" puts violence next to something close to beauty, "I Am the Tyrant" hits flat and hard, "Nun Fucker" removes any remaining ambiguity, and "Nemesis Divinus" closes it as a march rather than a collapse.
They formed in Tucson, Arizona in 2020, which is a long way from the forests this music usually claims, and the desert suits it better than the claim would.