I remember the date I first heard an All Them Witches song. ‘When God Comes Back’ came up on shuffle, the hard rock Americana blues of it answering an unnamed need for something solid and driving and alive, something to get me out of the doldrums that my life had begun to resemble. I remember the sequence from their front page – ‘God’, ‘Charles William’, ‘The Marriage of the Coyote Woman’ – and I remember the face I pulled realising how great they sounded, how profoundly right they felt to me. Within a week, I’d discover their KEXP sessions. Within six months, I’ll have gone to see them six times in three countries, once travelling five hours to a sold out gig in Leeds without a ticket and asking the people queuing for one. In the four years since, it’s only gotten more adventurous.
All of this to say – this is my band. Anyone who deeply loves music has a group like that: a revving engine behind self-exploration and self-expansion, song lyrics sewn into every crisis, every joy, a story behind every live show, friends made and flights taken, adoration bordering on unhealthy, a catalyst for more (oh, so much more) than just a good night of dancing. If you don’t have one, find it. When you find it, don’t fight it. Go crazy. It might save your life.
Born of the melting pot of top tier musicianship that is Nashville, TN, All Them Witches started off as a psych blues blend and across six studio albums and numerous singles, burst open any conceivable edges of that label. Transcendental jams on century-old folk ballads (‘Blacksnake Blues’) share a tracklist with eerie stripped back meditations like ‘Fall Into Place’, the pounding relentless metal drive of ‘Enemy of my Enemy’ harkens back to early punk experiments on Our Mother Electricity, and then you have pyschy heartbreakers like ‘Talisman’ and ‘Rats in Ruin’, all powered by the blues guitar of Ben McLeod (Gilmore’s natural spiritual successor, in my opinion).
House of Mirrors is their 7th studio album and their first release of new material since 2022’s Pandora’s box of experimental tracks Baker’s Dozen. Hotly anticipated and already hotly debated, it marks both a departure and a return in sound (“When the going’s like a returning / The Road is mighty dark” as ’41’ would put it). Perhaps the hint is in the title. “Found a way out / The dull house of mirrors / Now back to my old ways” sings the chorus of ‘Saturn Song’ and I can’t help wondering – which one is the house of mirrors? This album or their previous discography? Have they been looking for a way out all along or is this a spiral closing in on itself and coming back to itself?
Like the mirror maze, the album traps the solid-bodied form of ATW and morphs, reflects, distorts, refracts and looks back at the many fractal pieces that make the band we love today. Thematically – and keep in mind, this is all interpretation, the band wrote what they wrote for their own reasons, now the album belongs to all of us and things are gonna get trippy, because I love dissecting symbolism so much, so we can all agree that we’re hearing different things from the start – thematically, this feels like a spring cleaning of the soul, like taking a mercilessly close look at your life and seeing where things no longer fit, what needs keeping, what needs culling.
The blend of genres that always defined them is still here. What is gone are the long jam sections, the old travelling track, maybe instrumental-only, that acted like a hand jerking the power plug off your brain and granting permission to slip into a different stream of consciousness. Instead there is an assertiveness I’ve never heard before, a clarity of who they are and how things should be within the realm of their soundscape. It stands out to me that there’s more effects on Parks’ voice on some tracks, but that it’s also the most vulnerably soft I’ve ever heard him.
There is a darkness inside the music itself – not the mysterious, occult, magical one of ‘Diamond’ or ‘Alabaster’, but the very real ugly and contorted parts of the human heart that don’t and shouldn’t come out easily. Where in the past they were looking for God (Dying Surfer Meets His Maker), meaning (Sleeping through the War), a blueprint to the universe (ATW) or a way to fight back against a confusing malevolent force (Nothing as the Ideal, not accidentally their heaviest, most metal album), what they’re searching for now is no longer outside. It’s completely and terrifyingly within.
Song by Song
House of Mirrors eases into your ears with the gentle intro of ‘Red Rocking Chair’, a fresh take on the Appalachian folk song that they had previously merged with their piece ‘Swallowed by the Sea’ (off their second album Lightning at the Door), and it becomes clear from the first chorus, the first collapse into that doomy riff that would stomp you into the ground if it were a boot, that this is an album about loss, about misplaced love and thwarted ambitions – to connect, to touch, to understand. It feels like a breaking point, as the riff comes back slower and heavier each time, the whole band building up to the inevitable topple of the mountain. It feels like Parks has waited all his life to yell out “It’s who will call you honey“.
So unsurprisingly there is something creepy, dystopian and almost alarming about the ‘Culling Line’ mix, from the siren-like swell of guitar to the megaphone distortion on the voice. The lyrics too taste evil, “whatcha thinking when you’re all alone? I’m coming, are you awake?”, of this age of cyber-surveillance and careless access to people’s private lives. Yet musically what it achieves is a magic trick. The bass and voice all follow one another in close harmony, tracing the same melodic riff in and around each other, so that when in the final chorus, Parks only sings “If you want to go“, you naturally fill in “I’ll be there any time” over the explosion of keys and guitar that comes next. It’s almost like the voice is still there, drowned out, a ghost, a haunting.
The only thing that can answer such overpowering immaterial fear is solid ground, as by the incantation of a lofi riff on a wonky radio, we burst straight into outlaw country, spurs clinking and sweat dripping, with the country-tinged ‘Aethernet’. “You got your hold on me / But I keep walking away“. There’s a weariness here, an exhaustion at having to save yourself constantly from this relentless evil, a tiredness that even by the fast-paced ending never really lifts (although this is a moment where Christian Powers really shines on the drums). The tone on Ben’s guitar is a killer. The slide comes out of nowhere like a scythe, cuts through the mix and begs you pay attention. It’s a beast of a solo moment.
Keeping up the momentum is maybe the fastest singing Parks has ever done on the hectic ‘Hold Up Say What’, featuring a reference to 1971’s animated classic The Point! (sure didn’t expect anyone else in the world to namecheck Oblio in the year of our Lord 2026). There is a running theme of expectations and letting them go, of wanting to be wanted (“Come on let me go to your party / (….) / tell myself to love everybody / Hold me tightly“) and yet knowing that road will only make you lose yourself. That double injury incurred cuts the violent tempo and we’re left in a wasteland of quiet, with only Allan’s violin and a one-note pluck from Ben holding up Parks’ voice, as he sings “Call me up all in white”. The effect is devastating, heartbreaking, and so is the anger when it finally surfaces. Live, “Cut me down” is a raging growl. This clear-eyed moment, of seeing the uselessness of chasing the unworthy is made explicit in the lyrics “Needle’s eye, fail to fit / Idle life, over it” and answered in the much darker tone of the guitar.
And then it all goes quiet. The flicker of rebellion breaks something in the narrative voice of ‘Go Getter’. After all the torment, by casting off the weight of others, there can finally be a moment of reflection of all that got trampled and sacrificed in order to keep that weight and that ambition moving. “All in all I threw the dice again, and laughed the way I fan the flames like him“. The danger that the cycle may start again is there, but there is also too much regret, too much sorrow to allow for it. The guitar and keys float imperceptibly around the voice, making it sound like a song sung underwater, heard from miles away. It makes me want to curl up in the grass and cry.
From this silence, Parks counts us into ‘Starting Line’, a song that feels exactly like its namesake. Here, all the hard work of introspection pays off. The lyrics stand their ground, but self aware enough to know there’s no right way to go about it, “I ain’t always so kind / Better you than me buddy back at the starting line”. Nobody comes out unscathed or with a clear conscience, but there’s a great feeling of liberation in selfishness, in letting go of everything material in order to save your self and your ambition (“Take away all my money, Take away all my time / I cannot fall back to the starting line“). Musically, we’re taken from the extreme peacefulness of Ben and Parks playing acoustic guitars à la ‘Mellowing’, as if around a campfire at dusk, to the cruel descent into a hellish bridge that seems to speak from a completely different narrative voice (more cynical, much darker, “Everything you know will die, I have heard it from the ground“), concluding with a shrill electric guitar solo, the whole band racing to the end.
Other people have called ATW a band that seems to have come straight out of the 80s, hibernating until the times were ready for them. While many of their songs would have easily been on heavy rotation on the radio of that era, they take a clear step into modernity with ‘Turn on the Light’, a song I can only describe as jaunty. It reminds me of Hozier‘s ‘Too Sweet’, with a similarly upbeat mixed-up-front bass line, and the lyrics do harken to Queens of the Stone Age and 2010s pop-rock anthems (there’s something about the word dopamine that particularly calls to mind Arctic Monkeys, especially with a bridge like “How long until you make the change that you promised to yourself“). It’s a song with a skip in its step. In some ways, it feels like the song you play after a breakdown, when you’re trying to pick yourself back up with something light and fresh.
So, with the heart eased and appeased, space for grace appears. With ‘Angel on the Wayside’ comes an acknowledgment that not everyone can be saved (“This time around you threw your life away (…) Hate me if you will“). Following a similar structure as ‘Hold Up Say What’ connects the two thematically – before, there was the rush to be accepted. Now, there is the self-acceptance needed to forgive. There is more determination and more distance. The beautifully slow bridge seems to step away for a moment from its rejuvenated fervour in order to look back one last time and extend a hand in mercy, even though there’s no forcing someone to take it (“Angel on the wayside, but you feel no better”). This has been my favourite since I first heard it live, with its head-swaying tempo, a fun main riff and the heartfelt interlude, and it was awesome to hear Ben’s “Yeah!” at the end of it, from what must have been an epic live taping.
And then comes ‘The Welterweight’, the last released single and the one that took me by surprise the most. Inspired by Parks’ grandfather, who was a welterweight champion in Alabama, it is a dialogue between the narrator, who “grew up as the welterweight of this town“, and this unbreakable power, who “took out every welterweight around”, now come to teach him a lesson and put him in his place (“Come back again when you’re healthy / I’ll let you try another round”). It coming towards the end of this journey into the self marks that final humbling moment, that whatever you’ve done can be taken away, that it’s better to be “fully in love with the mount and the road opened up” than whatever destination you imagine awaits you. It’s the most vocally impressive piece, with its folk runs and belting final chorus, the keys shine front and centre (both piano and organ) and it’s where I love the drums the most – they take on such a soaring quality, fitting for this incredible verse “You know that my fear of the sky is inherited /…/ You know that the look of the eye is imperative“. From the first listen, it floored me.
Finally, after the album-long search for a place, comes ‘Saturn Song’, where “the boys who march forever on, off to do what they want” are juxtaposed with “the chores, the garden, and the plowin’ / Daylight won’t raise itself'”. This most of all feels like old school ATW, partly because it is an old acoustic song of Parks’ (as yet unreleased under his JR Parks project) and partly because it’s abstract and journeying, luminous in its Taoist wisdom. Delightfully, they got Allan behind a concert piano for this, with the little rain drops of notes chasing Christian’s drums into my favourite verse of the whole album, “lose the body, lose the journey“. There is a deliciously rich tone on the guitar and a peaceful solidness to the beat. The turmoil, the running in circles, the barrage of sound is far behind. In the end, the road is still dark, but it’s theirs.
That’s where they get me. That’s why, from the first I ever heard ‘Am I Going Up’, it felt like a hand reached into my brain and started rewiring it. In my own personal lore, All Them Witches came in like a wave, swept me up and away from who I’d always been and into uncharted waters. Maybe therapy would have worked for me. I think hearing ‘Angel on the Wayside’ live, with friends I’d made on the barricade, made for much better memories. There are great synchronicities in life, where art feels crafted for your own experiences, and this just so happens to be mine.
The difficulty for any new album is to convince its audience that it will be there for them when they need it, that it will be something they reach for, that connects, that matters to them. Of course, musicians first of all make music for themselves, but when it becomes the public’s upon release, there is a massive element of trust involved, the album being like a gift, an offering, a little “hey, we really like this, we think you’ll like it too”. Creating that connection to the individual takes time. The songs need to be out in the wild. They need to float on the airwaves, to be plucked at the right time or to drop when you least expect them and most need them. I often say the great power of music is to offer words when there are none and make explicit what you can only feel confusingly inside.
What I know now is there will be dark nights where the only words accessible to me will be the lyrics of ‘Go Getter’. That I’ll hum “Go to sleep sugar” instead of “Go to sleep killer” to my friends’ children. That I’ll need to live with “I feel the darkness more than I can say“. The abstract jamming meditations are gone. If it were a sign, I’d say my time for reflection is over too. I’m done postponing. I gotta get back on the road and move.
House of Mirrors is out now on all streaming platforms and available to purchase HERE.
All Them Witches is Ben McLeod on lead guitar, Charles Michael Parks, Jr. on bass/vocals, Christian Powers on drums and Allan Van Cleave on keys and violin. They are back on tour in UK and Europe this June, tickets HERE.