Andrew Shackleton has left Wytch Hazel, weeks after guitarist Alex Haslam did the same.
Two musicians out of a four piece inside a month is the kind of sequence that usually precedes an announcement nobody wants to read, and the band have not said anything beyond confirming each departure as it happened.
Neither statement gives a reason. Shackleton decided to leave, is the whole of it.
The timing is awkward rather than dramatic. V: Lamentations came out in 2025, the fifth album in a run that has been remarkably steady for a band working this far outside any scene, and a record that new normally means two years of shows rather than a line-up emptying out.
They formed in Lancaster in 2011 and have spent the time since writing hard rock and heavy metal that sounds as though the last fifty years had not happened, with twenty releases behind them on Bad Omen Records.
Whoever replaces the two of them inherits a catalogue with a very specific sound and an audience that came for it.