The Tamesis
The way the band Witch Post came together is a bit strange. A few years ago, Scottish singer-songwriter Dylan Fraser found himself regularly traveling from Edinburgh to London, using the five-hour train journey to listen to new music; after stumbling across Alaska Reid’s 2020 EP big rabbit, They then covered one of the American musician’s tracks on his Instagram Story and set a date for a writing session while Reed was visiting London from his native Los Angeles.
They met at Charli XCX’s show the night before they were scheduled to head to the studio. Then, after chatting, they realized they both grew up in towns with the same names: Reed in the rural city of Livingston, Montana; and Then, After they started making music together and trying to come up with a name, Reed visited a folk museum in northern England and discovered a “witch’s post” – a 17th-century superstition in which people carved crosses on their fireplaces to prevent witches from coming down the chimney and wreaking havoc on your home. After Reid kissed it and sent Fraser a photo, he pointed out that the engraving was actually the Cross of St. Andrew: the heraldic symbol on the Scottish flag. “There were a lot of weird little things that happened along the way,” Fraser said via Zoom from his home in London. “It feels a little weird sometimes, but it always feels easy,” added Reed, who joined the call from Los Angeles.
Their Witch Post music is the product of this rare and somewhat mysterious creative alchemy—you can attribute it partly to their shared obsession with folklore and storytelling, but also to the way their voices intertwine and even begin to blur at times. You can hear all of this on their new EP, Butterfly, It was announced today that it will be released on March 20th via Partisan Records. The first single, “Worry Angel” (also released today) begins with a metallic guitar strum that could be in the style of a ’90s alt-rock song, accompanied by Fraser An urgent, anxious croon: “I’ve done everything right, so is everything wrong?” Reed’s lilting, textured vocals float over the chorus: “Why do you worry, angel?” As the song unfolds, their voices begin to weave together like two strands of ivy – Scottish lilt and Montana twang – crawling over a solid stone wall of hairy trash guitar. It sounds wonderful, a little mysterious, but very, very catchy. (All of which have been themes in Witch Post’s work, which has included a handful of singles and an EP since the two joined forces in 2024, beast, Released last April. )
