WITCH FEVER: The witching hour and exploring the gothic in FEVEREATEN

Amy Walpole is not a witch. However, the people she knows who study witchcraft say that she’s attuned to it - some even surprised by the fact that she doesn’t practice it. It’s easy to draw conclusions, as she does like to collect things, like bones and branches, or keep special objects that hold power. She tells OOR that sometimes, she does tarot. In her art, she's inspired by natural forms and horror imagery, knotted tightly with paganism and the rural north. 

Above all, she likes to read about it. Diagnosed with autism at twenty-nine, she realised that maybe her neurodivergence was the root of her love of the macabre. Misunderstood for a lot of her youth and most of her early twenties, she now understands why she feels an affinity with headstrong and challenging women that shape her own narrative, just as much as those on the page: “A lot of the time they're seen as being the bad guys, when actually they're just like being themselves. They rebel.”  

In archetypes like Eve, who is centralised in Amy’s religious upbringing and her views on the church's subtle micro-aggressions towards women and minorities, the influence on WITCH FEVER is spellbinding. At the core of 2022’s Congregation was a narrative cut deep with Amy’s lived experience and trauma, made rotten with cathartic retorts against piety and ordnance. As angry as the record is autobiographical, there is a power in speaking your truth out loud. Biting the apple with the band’s latest album, FEVEREATEN - out tomorrow - they align the pain and the horror tropes to create one of their most conceptual works yet. 

Three years on, and Amy’s relationship with the divine is still complex and all-consuming, but the narrative has changed again. The Garden, their slow-burning sear on the Genesis story, is also written about Eve. Not just about sin, but the conscious conversation of navigating an archaic text in the modern world. “I think that this is just a reflection of misogyny anyway, absolutely. The song is also sort of about me, coming to terms with internalised misogyny and learning more about feminism, that just because I'm a woman doesn't immediately make me not misogynistic.”  Here, WITCH FEVER’s power is in its potency. Always with a conscious angling to make their worlds engraved with symbolism and purpose - intertextually excellent and loaded with conflicting reasons. “You don't reach an end goal of feminism. It's a constant, always moving.”

With her master's degree in Gothic Literature, Amy has found inspiration in haunted spaces. “More often than not, in possession fiction or film, the space around the woman that's been possessed sort of starts degrading in the same way that their body degrades. So it starts reflecting in her body.” In conversation with Helen Oyeyemi’s 'White Is For Witching', Jac Jem’s 'The Grip Of It' and even Ari Aster’s cinematic spectacle Hereditary, she explores a trauma that haunts you and the location it manifests itself in, even after the event has taken place. 

Striking comparisons to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper' also manifest in this space. Radical in its feminist depiction of mental illness, the narrative follows a young woman on bed rest after the birth of her baby. Confined to the upstairs nursery, the degradation of her mental condition is spurred on by the room’s yellow wallpaper, and she eventually believes herself to be trapped behind it. “I've loved The Yellow Wallpaper for so long. That's like a formative text for me. Anyway, it's so creepy and just horrible, but it's like so perfect.”

“[About The Yellow Wallpaper] I was like, looking at this feeling of like being watched, being haunted, and not knowing whether it was like God, because I've had a really religious upbringing. Throughout my childhood, the church would always tell us that God was always watching. It was very based in sin and shame.”

“Is this thing on my back that's always above me, watching me? Is it God? Is it like something more supernatural? Is it just like my trauma?” 

Whilst Amy says her influences are “blurry” and piled with horror tropes, FEVEREATEN pulls together the foundations of a truly human place to process real emotions. Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘In The Dream House’ - which Amy has also read and “loved” - uses the building, or rebuilding, of a house or ‘archive’ to understand a dark period of the narrator's life. Aside from each chapter being written in a different genre (that is, both extremely raw and gripping), it makes whatever occurs in the house a place of power and is created by its maker. The architecture is there to both comfort and reflect its owner. As Mercado writes: ‘What is placed in or left out is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives.’ 

In this way, FEVEREATEN is the haunted house of the band's own design. As wicked and provoking as something out of a Shirley Jackson short story, with the same attention to push for progression that Mary Shelley drew from 'Frankenstein'. Discourse in gender conventions, microaggressions and managing mental health continues the narrative into the present with radical thought in mind. As much as Amy likes to read fiction, indulging in new perspectives is something that she uses to make sense of the world.  In our conversation, she mentions Nada Ella’s ‘Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts’, a deconstruction of Palestine through a feminist perspective, and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race’.  

In the fleshy pulp of FEVEREATEN, the record also dazzles sonically with abrasive influences. Punchy openers Dead To Me! and Final Girl are kinetic and frantic, with moments of intense reflection. The sternum-cracking kapow of See Ya Next Tuesday throws Outbreak-infested hardcore into their murky, unrelenting sound. Tracks like Northstar and Drank The Sap delve into doom, leaving us asking if WITCH FEVER is truly folk horror (Amy seems to think so!) The record is seamless and striking, melting into itself so effortlessly, whilst also giving each track its moment to make progressive moves. More importantly, it gorgeously soundtracks the witching hour just in time for Halloween. 

On the surface, applying horror to her story may be seen as a point of escapism. But this could not be further from the truth. “Horror is a really good tool to reflect culture back at itself, and to hold up a mirror to what's going on in society and make people like really think, because it's such an intense genre, it's really great at making people think about what's going on in the world.”

Amy Walpole is not a witch, but because of her religious upbringing, a lot of the concepts surrounding witchcraft feel so far away from reality that she’s very keen on keeping both feet on the ground and staying grounded. “I feel like there are a lot of parts of witchcraft that make me feel like I could just not be grounded at all. I’m on my own journey with it.” 

When it comes to horror, Amy has the final words:  “There's not really that much thought that goes into it. It's just the fact that I love it so much that it ends up being there.”

As WITCH FEVER take on the UK and Europe with Danish metallers Volbeat, Amy will be reading. Having the amazing capability to read on transport, she takes a stack of books with her on tour to pass the time. Included in this is Mitchell Luthi’s ‘His Black Tongue’ and Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee’s ‘Race To The Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism’. 

Words: Amber Brooks

Cover image and promo shot: Frank Fieber

Cover Design: Robert Halls

With thanks to: Stay Golden PR