Witch house was named as a joke in 2009. Its sound ended up on Yeezus and in horror films

What is witch house? The short answer: slow, heavy hip-hop drums, vocals pitched down until they sound like they're coming through a wall, synths soaked in reverb, and a lot of crosses and triangles where the band names should be. It flared up between 2009 and 2012, got laughed at, and was declared dead before most people had worked out how to spell it.

The longer answer is more interesting, because the genre died and almost nothing it did went away. salem, the band most responsible for it, surprise-released a new album in May. And the record label that grew up around the sound ended up somewhere nobody would have predicted in 2010: writing the music for horror films.

A name invented in December 2009

Travis Egedy, who records as Pictureplane, came up with "witch house" with his friend Shams as a joke about the "occult-based house music" they were making. He used it in a Pitchfork year-end feature, and the blogs picked it up within weeks. Egedy said later that when he coined it, witch house "didn't even really exist". The name arrived first and the bands were sorted into it afterwards.

What got sorted was a specific set of habits. The tempos came from DJ Screw's chopped and screwed tapes out of Houston. The drums came from Southern rap. The vocals and atmosphere owed more to 4AD-style ethereal wave and to shoegaze than to anything in hip-hop. Then there was the typography. Artists used triangles, crosses and Unicode glyphs in their names and track titles, partly to keep the music hard to find online. The Mexico City producer Ritualz is still known by the logo †‡†, and in 2018 he had to remind people on Twitter that "a logo is not another spelling."

There's a small joke in there for anyone who catalogs music for fun. A scene that tried to make itself unsearchable became one of the most heavily tagged microgenres of its era, and the tag outlived most of the bands.

salem, the band that couldn't play live

salem formed in Traverse City, Michigan, in 2006: Jack Donoghue, John Holland and Heather Marlatt. Two EPs in 2008, Yes I Smoke Crack and Water, laid out the sound, and King Night in September 2010 made it famous. It's still the record people mean when they say witch house: a huge, blown-out title track built on church-choir synths and a beat that sounds like it's being dragged through mud.

The same year, salem played South by Southwest, and the set became a byword for a terrible live show. The band went quiet in 2012 and stayed quiet until 2020, when Donoghue and Holland came back without Marlatt for Fires in Heaven. Then, on 14 May 2026, with no warning and a Supreme clothing collaboration attached, they dropped this:

Red Dragon runs 31 tracks and an hour and 41 minutes, and most of it was recorded between 2007 and 2015. Fans picked out four songs that seem to be new: "Everyday", "Drive by", "Daughter" and "Blood Brothers". It is less an album than an opened vault, and it is the best way to hear what salem sounded like across the whole witch house window, if you have the patience for it. The new songs are not the reason to come.

Tri Angle, the label that grew out of it

Robin Carolan started Tri Angle Records in 2010. Its first release was Balam Acab's See Birds EP, and the second was oOoOO's self-titled EP. Both got filed under witch house straight away, and for a year or so Tri Angle was treated as the genre's home label.

Balam Acab, real name Alec Koone, made the scene's prettiest record. Wander/Wonder came out on 29 August 2011, recorded in the house he grew up in, full of water sounds, chopped vocals and a kind of tenderness salem never went near. The Wire put it at 17 in its top 50 releases of 2011.

Holy Other, an anonymous producer from Manchester, followed with Held in August 2012. It is slower and more R&B than Balam Acab, and its best tracks sound like a slow jam heard through the floor of the room above.

Then the label kept moving and left the tag behind. In 2013 Tri Angle released The Haxan Cloak's Excavation, a record built from sub-bass and dread, with almost nothing a 2010 witch house blog would have recognized.

This is where it gets odd. Bobby Krlic, the man behind The Haxan Cloak, scored Ari Aster's Midsommar in 2019. Carolan himself, after helping Björk finish Vulnicura and getting credited as the "fifth ear" on Utopia, scored Robert Eggers' The Northman in 2022 with Sebastian Gainsborough, who had released records on Tri Angle as Vessel. Carolan went on to score Eggers' Nosferatu in 2024. The label that started out hosting a joke genre about witches ended up writing music for films about pagan cults, Viking revenge and a vampire. Nobody planned it. Play Excavation and then the Midsommar score and it makes sense anyway.

The drums went to rap

The other half of the inheritance went to hip-hop, which is fair, since witch house borrowed its drums from there in the first place.

Clams Casino, the New Jersey producer behind Lil B's "I'm God" and early A$AP Rocky, released his Rainforest EP on Tri Angle on 27 June 2011. It collected five instrumentals that rappers had turned down. Heard next to Wander/Wonder, it makes the overlap between witch house and cloud rap obvious: the same fog, the same slowed-down voices used as texture, the same patience.

A year later Tri Angle put out Kings and Them, a mixtape by the young British producer Evian Christ. In 2013 he co-produced "I'm in It" on Kanye West's Yeezus. On the same album, salem's Jack Donoghue has a production credit on "Black Skinhead". Three years after a Pitchfork joke, two people from salem's and Tri Angle's corner of the internet were on the most argued-about rap record of the year.

After that the sound went underground again, this time on SoundCloud. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Black Kray and Sematary have all cited witch house, and Sematary's Haunted Mound records are the clearest descendant: horror imagery, blown-out bass and vocals mixed like they're coming from inside a grave. If you came to this through our field guide to phonk and the Memphis tapes underneath it, this is the other branch of the same slowed-down tree.

So was it a genre?

Barely, and only for about two years. In 2013 the Brooklyn duo Creep said they were glad witch house was dead. In 2024 Pitchfork put it on a list of 25 microgenres that briefly defined the last 25 years, which is about the right size for it. As a scene, witch house was mostly a tag, a handful of bands and a lot of blog posts.

As a set of techniques, it won. Slowed drums under reverb-drenched vocals are now an ordinary production choice in rap, and the dread Tri Angle cultivated is a standard way to score a horror film. That's the pattern with internet-born microgenres. Our vaporwave field guide traces the same arc for another sound that got its name online before it had a scene. The tag dies and the techniques get absorbed by everyone.

If you only play one record, make it Wander/Wonder. It's the one that sounds least like a period piece, and it shows the genre could be beautiful as well as spooky. If you want the real thing at its loudest and most ridiculous, King Night is still the record. Rate them, and tell us in the comments whether witch house deserves a place in your collection or just in a history of 2010 music blogs.