“The Craft” opens The Grim Botanical with chiming keyboards and the sound of an imaginary book being opened. Lasting only ninety seconds, it establishes the album less as a black metal recording than a small theatrical world in which black metal is one of several available forces. The melody has the bright artificial color of early dungeon synth, but a darker undertone keeps it from becoming decorative fantasy music. By the time “Call upon Your Name” arrives, Witches Moon has already constructed the room in which the rest of the album will occur: part woodland shrine, part amateur stage and part private studio crowded with keyboards, guitars and disembodied voices.
Released independently in October 2017, The Grim Botanical was the third Witches Moon full-length to appear during the project’s remarkably active first year. The anonymous Raleigh, North Carolina musician known as the Witch had introduced a mixture of raw melodic black metal and medievalist synthesizer music on A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn, then moved toward instrumental dungeon synth on Azazel Bedazzle. This album brings those directions together again, but the balance has changed. Keyboards no longer seem like an atmospheric layer placed around the metal instrumentation. They lead the arrangements, determine the melodic character and often control when the guitars are allowed to intensify the music.
“Call upon Your Name” demonstrates that development immediately. Its synthesizers move with a fluidity absent from much of the debut, carrying a melody that is whimsical without losing its ceremonial quality. Guitar and percussion enter as reinforcement rather than interruption. The most striking addition is the vocal arrangement. Harsh cries remain part of the project’s vocabulary, but they are joined by clean, harmonized lines that give the song the character of a pagan invocation. The voices do not sound polished in a conventional sense; their slight awkwardness adds to the ritual illusion, as if several figures had gathered around the same melody without attempting to become a formal choir.
This expanded vocal range gives The Grim Botanical much of its personality. On the debut, the distant shriek functioned primarily as another abrasive surface within the guitars. Here, voices can become characters. They chant, harmonize, cry from the background or rise into a high register that sounds deliberately strange. “7, Here Comes the Piper” makes particularly vivid use of this approach. Its elevated vocal line has an eccentric, almost storybook quality, less concerned with menace than enchantment. Against the swirling keyboards, it suggests a figure whose friendliness and danger cannot be separated. The song is playful, but its playfulness carries the uncertainty of a folk tale in which following the music may be a serious mistake.
“Weave a Wreath of Halo Harmful” occupies the darker side of the album’s garden. The title itself typifies the Witch’s language, joining beauty and injury within the same image. Synthesizers form a layered melodic canopy while the metal instrumentation supplies heat and forward movement underneath. The guitars are still comparatively thin, and the programmed percussion retains a synthetic attack, but the arrangement uses those limitations more confidently than the debut. Rather than trying to simulate the weight of a full band, Witches Moon treats the instruments as contrasting colors. The keyboard can sound lush because the guitar remains narrow; a harsh vocal can cut clearly because the rhythm section is not overloaded with low-end density.
That approach helps the album move rapidly between moods. The Grim Botanical is only thirty-three minutes long, and most of its nine tracks fall between three and five minutes. Songs therefore have little reason to prolong one atmosphere after its central idea has been established. An ominous synth passage may suddenly yield to a bright melody, while an aggressive black metal section can open into something serene without a lengthy transition. These changes occasionally feel abrupt, but abruptness is integral to the record’s appeal. Witches Moon presents the supernatural not as a single dark climate but as a place where delight, absurdity and threat coexist.
“Succulent Egg” may have the album’s most conspicuously peculiar title, and its music shares that sense of grotesque humor. The piece swells through keyboard figures, vocal entrances and stronger rhythmic accents, periodically sounding grand before some unexpected texture unsettles the impression. It illustrates why “botanical” is more than decorative wording. The album’s structures resemble unnatural growths: a simple melodic stem produces several incompatible branches, ornamental synth tones curl around distorted guitar, and voices emerge like unfamiliar flowers. The compositions grow outward from compact themes rather than following the verse-and-chorus discipline of ordinary metal songs.
The title track turns this garden into a complete environment. “The Grim Botanical” balances darkness and light more evenly than the surrounding pieces, with ominous harmonic shading beneath melodies that could otherwise seem almost cheerful. Witches Moon’s greatest skill is this ability to make brightness suspicious. The keyboards are frequently colorful and openly synthetic, yet their cheerfulness never guarantees safety. A major-sounding flourish may be followed by a blackened rasp; a gentle phrase may repeat until it feels like entrapment. The record does not depend on thick fog or continuous dissonance to communicate unease. It allows beauty to generate unease from within.
“As of Cain” introduces a more biblical shadow, although the album never settles into a single narrative. Its titles draw from witchcraft, plants, ritual language, folklore, scripture and Arthurian imagery without explaining how they connect. This looseness works because the musical identity is so coherent. Each piece belongs to the same theatrical landscape even when its reference points differ. The songs feel like scenes selected from a larger mythology whose missing parts must be imagined by the listener. Rather than laying out a concept, the Witch supplies objects—a wreath, a piper, an egg, Cain, a lake—and lets the sounds determine their relationships.
“Harlot of the Lake” is the clearest example of that mythological compression. Its title appears to distort the Lady of the Lake into a more dangerous and morally ambiguous figure, replacing chivalric distance with accusation and desire. The music similarly bends courtly or folk-like melody through black metal texture. Synth lines suggest elegance, while vocals and guitar prevent the piece from becoming stately. This is not historical medieval music, and Witches Moon makes no attempt at authenticity. The medieval quality comes from a modern fantasy vocabulary: modal melodies, synthetic choirs, archaic phrasing and the suggestion of ceremonies occurring outside recorded history.
The record’s production is cleaner than its raw reputation might imply. Individual keyboard lines remain audible even when the guitars and vocals are active, and the quick mood changes do not dissolve into an indistinct mass. At the same time, nothing sounds excessively corrected. Drum programming can be stiff, vocal layers do not always merge smoothly, and some transitions expose the solitary construction behind the music. These features preserve the project’s scale. The Grim Botanical sounds like the work of one person building an elaborate world with whatever is close at hand, and its imagination is enlarged rather than diminished by the visibility of that process.
“Call of the Void” closes the album without guitar or vocals, returning to the instrumental language of “The Craft.” The piece is brief, celestial and oddly welcoming. Instead of presenting the void as terror, it renders it as an opening beyond the crowded garden. Synthesizer tones float with a calm that feels slightly unreal after the record’s many voices and abrupt turns. The symmetry is effective: a book opens, nine scenes unfold, and the final instrumental leaves the listener at a threshold rather than providing a firm conclusion.
The Grim Botanical is more confident than A Swing of Sickle to Summers Dawn because it no longer needs to prove that black metal and dungeon synth can occupy the same song. It treats their coexistence as a starting point and adds folk melody, clean vocal harmony, theatrical characterization and a surprisingly broad emotional range. Not every experiment is elegant. The high voices can sound eccentric, the programmed rhythms remain limited, and some songs change direction before fully developing their best ideas. Yet elegance would be the wrong standard for music this curious.
What matters is the coherence created from so many unlikely details. The Grim Botanical can be aggressive, peaceful, sinister, comic and genuinely beautiful within a few minutes, but it never loses the distinctive Witches Moon atmosphere. The Witch approaches genre as a collection of materials rather than a set of borders, cultivating each sound until it tangles with the next. The resulting garden is artificial, overgrown and occasionally poisonous. It is also alive with melody. Among the project’s rapid sequence of early releases, The Grim Botanical stands out as the moment Witches Moon’s private mythology began to speak in several voices at once.
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