No one is saying you gotta rush to wherever you buy incense and stock up on sage. Nor is anyone saying cloaks are required before pressing Play. But as a subgenre Witch house is pretty All The Way In or Not At All; lasting either eternally or between 2000 and 2013 (depending on which forums you creep on), Witch house scrapes up elements of ambient, goth rock, trance, and industrial and sews them all together into something as brooding as it is engaging. Wrap all of it up in the skin of mid 2000s internet culture and you’ve got a genre so niche it spins back around to being as influential as post-punk and trap.
This collection, like any sort of “check these out first” collection, is not meant to be fully cohesive or representative of the genre. Like many subgenres there are die-hards who will look at this list and go “well what about” with various levels of fury. What fascinates me about Witch House is that even amongst those responsible for crafting its essential recordings, nobody can seem to agree on what is required to be considered True Witch House Music. There are forums dedicated to cataloging seemingly every release within the genre, almost as if all of it came from the same label. Hell, there’s a possibility a lot of the artists mentioned would hate being categorized as Witch house in the first place.
A lot of what constitutes this list came from asking friends for their recommendations and the occasional wading through message boards. In a lot of ways the act of researching this collection reminded me of how I first started getting into weird music through the internet when I was a teenager; I knew nothing and nobody was going to find it for me. No algorithm pumping tertiary RIYLs after an album ends. I had to go find it myself, and once I started I never stopped.
So. Headphones on, lights off, let’s start digging.