For their new album, bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch's bounds. Like 2017's lauded Mirror Reaper, The Clandestine Gate is a single 83-minute track -- a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called “Future's Shadow.”
While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over “Mirror Reaper” and Bell Witch's 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, Stygian Bough Volume 1[i/], [i]The Clandestine Gate drew those instruments closer to the center of its compositions. The band reunited with their longtime producer Billy Anderson as they began negotiating these new compositional weights. On The Clandestine Gate, Bell Witch's twinned voices build off of the chantlike textures of previous records while steering toward more developed melodic lines, structured harmonies, and rhythmic death metal growls.
