Witchcraft "Idag" LP

More than 20 years after their debut, Witchcraft's seventh album, IDAG, is an awaited full accounting of who they are as a band. Those who have clamored for the return to an earlier sound rooted in '70s classic progressive and heavy rock will delight to the strut of "Irreligious Flamboyant Flame" while the eight-minute opening title-track is the heaviest the band have ever sounded, and a succession of interspersed acoustic-based pieces helps create a vision of a new, soulfully folkish doom taking shape as they continue to move inexorably forward. The storyline of Witchcraft's growth, from Pelander's starting the band in Örebro in 2000 in the wake of his prior outfit Norrsken's disbanding. A generational landmark of a 2004 self-titled debut helped spark a retroist movement that has become its own subgenre, but Witchcraft never stopped growing. IDAG is the tie that draws all of their more than two decades of exploring and growth together. Whatever they've done in the past and whatever they'll do in the future, IDAG feels like a nexus for defining who and what Witchcraft are.