Nov 8

Nov 8 Album Review : Bell Witch & Aerial Ruin - Stygian Bough: Vol II (2025)

Every subgenre of metal has its own theory of extremity and they all contradict each other in hilarious ways. Thrash and death metal believe extremity is about speed with the caveat that death metal can also be extreme lyrically. Black metal interprets extremity as anti-fidelity, recording something so lo-fi it sounds like it was captured in a snowstorm on purpose, usually because it was. Doom metal, on the other hand, decided that true extremity was the opposite of motion. It’s about being so slow, so gravitationally heavy, that it becomes an act of resistance against time itself.

That particular contest more or less ended in 2017 when Bell Witch released Mirror Reaper, an 83-minute song that you could (if you were patient, high, or heartbroken enough) listen to all the way through. It was both the end of something and the start of a creative problem: what the hell do you do after you’ve already made the longest, slowest, saddest metal song imaginable? The Clandestine Gate felt like a sequel, but Stygian Bough Vol. II, their ongoing collaboration with dark folk artist Aerial Ruin, feels like a slow turning of the ship.

Bell Witch haven’t abandoned doom, but they’re expanding its borders, wandering toward something that’s still heavy but no longer confined by labels or even heaviness itself.

Stygian Bough Vol. II features four songs adding up to a whopping 59 minute of music. Spiritually inspired by the work of folklorist and old school anthropologist James Frazer, this project operates from the idea that contact between objects creates a thread between them.It’s a romantic idea disguised as anthropology, and it perfectly explains what’s happening here. Stygian Bough isn’t just a collaboration between Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin, it’s the thread binding them, a new entity born from their collision.

It doesn’t sound like doom and it doesn’t sound like folk; it sounds like the slow formation of something that shouldn’t exist but somehow does, like a planet discovering gravity for the first time.

The opener Waves Become The Sky is disarmingly simple, funeral doom metal filtered through the logic of a hymn. Its emotional center isn’t in the riffs or the distortion but in the harmonized vocals, which feel both familiar and eerily celestial, like if Sigur Rós wrote a requiem for the end of the world. he song’s title tells you everything you need to know: this is music that wants to transcend itself. There’s a faintly cultlike quality to the repetition and reverence of it all, but in the best possible way, the kind that makes you wish you could believe in something that completely.

Jesse Schreibman'’s drumming anchors the song, steady and elemental, but it’s less a beat than a slow gravitational pull. It’s not the sound of movement; it’s the sound of the sky making room for whatever’s trying to rise into it.

King of the Woods leans on the heavier side, but not in the way you’d expect. It alternates between elegiac guitar, gloriously overblown bass, and long stretches of near-silence that border on ambient meditation. Brian Eno levels of contemplation, where brittle notes just hang in the air like dust in a cathedral. At certain points, I wasn’t entirely sure I was still listening to Bell Witch, which is probably the best compliment I can give them. If Waves Become the Sky was about transcendence, this one’s about the search for it, the messy, uneven part where you’re not sure if revelation is coming or if you’ve just been staring at the same tree too long.

I almost never read lyrics, so this isn’t an interpretation so much as a reaction, intuition trying to make sense of vibration. The closing guitar lead ratchets up the tension and introduces a subtle asymmetry that makes the song feel tormented, alive, and slightly wounded. It’s probably my favorite track on Stygian Bough Vol. II, precisely because it feels like the sound of belief struggling to stay alive while also trying to merge into something greater than what understanding can fathom.

The third song From Dominion Let Them Bleed is the shortest on Stygian Bough Vol. II at a mere eleven minutes. It opens with acoustic guitar and pipe organ : delicate, spectral textures that feel distinctly Aerial Ruin, as if Bell Witch momentarily wandered into someone else’s séance. Then, around the 3:30 mark, the floodgates open. The drums and electric guitars erupt like a volcanic memory surfacing mid-meditation.

The construction is almost theatrical but never corny, anchored by melodies that ache without ever resolving. It’s pain you can almost understand, but not quite. A sadness just out of emotional reach.

Musically, it might be the most elaborate composition on the album, and the back half veers closer to traditional metal structure with riffs with an almost classic rock sensibility. It’s a weird, wonderful tension : you can practically see the sonic portraits they’re painting, illuminated by flickering candlelight, yet the music never loses its ghostliness. I choose to believe that’s deliberate. A haunting by design.

The Told and the Leadened closes the album in classic Bell Witch fashion: paradox first, apocalypse second. At nineteen minutes, it’s the longest track on Stygian Bough Vol. II, yet it feels like a reflection of Waves Become the Sky seen through cracked glass. The structure is similar, slow ascension, haunting harmonies, but everything here is more turbulent, more distorted, more alive. Jesse Schreibman once again commands the song’s gravitational field like the world's most ferocious conductor. That dude is GOOD.

Around the halfway mark, the chaos breaks open into a folk interlude where Erik Moggridge takes over, his voice like a quiet incantation meant to remind you what calm used to sound like. But the peace doesn’t last; it’s only a bridge to something heavier, more muscular, almost elemental. The Told and the Leadened works like an equation: melancholy plus power equals catharsis. It’s an alchemical process where pain becomes language, distortion becomes release.

Even if the song’s architecture feels familiar, the intensity within it borders on spiritual. This is music that doesn’t just express sorrow; it extracts it.

Stygian Bough Vol. II is an investigation into what doom really means when you strip away the genre trappings. Not the sound of distortion or disrepair, but the philosophy underneath it. What does irreparable damage actually sound like? How many ways can you express a longing for something that isn’t there, and maybe never was? The record doesn’t offer answers, because doom rarely does. What it gives instead is the sense of asking the right questions. The slow, resonant ache of searching for meaning in the rubble.

It’s not a perfect record. There are stretches that feel barren, moments that seem to circle the void without landing anywhere concrete. But that’s part of the journey Bell Witch are on. They’re mapping new emotional coordinates, pushing beyond the limits of heaviness toward something more unknowable. Stygian Bough Vol. II feels less like a destination and more like the moment right before discovery. An echo in the dark that might someday become a new language.