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NIGHT HAG
Great Dismal Darkness

Rotted Life (2026)
Rating: 8.5/10

Four years on from their harrowing debut Phantasmal Scourge, Virginia death-doom outfit Night Hag is back with another fright fest. Being released days before Halloween is rather apt, as those autumnal shivers make way for nocturnal slithers as gloomy riffs worm their way along leafy sidewalks and through rustic fields stained by October fires lit by excited teens spinning tales of horror. Night Hag doesn’t necessarily lumber or provide excruciatingly slow black ooze, instead there’s that familiar echo of cavernous death metal. Night Hag is that sinister chill that sweeps through dimly lit corridors, manifesting as goose bumps one experiences in the presence of utmost dread.

The soundtrack relayed by Night Hag is a series of ghoulishly cold bellows and blusters, clammy to the touch and ultimately suffocating with each thread that manoeuvres from its dank orifice. ‘Drowned In Death’ opens proceedings as a slimy moss-coated dirge scraped by larynx gasps; a vocal style that is deeper, guttural and sicker than one would expect from such a composition.

On ‘Effluvia Tendrils’ there’s that dank n’ dismal air; a predictable but always engulfing layer of mould that drifts towards the likes of Cryptworm. The drumming here especially is an abysmal exhibition to behold; the organic tumbles kick through the cloying webbing as turbulent thick waves of ash form congealed walls of decaying gloop.

All around the eaves are cobwebs constructed of mould, each track busy enough to cast off any truly dismal sea frets, unless of course it’s the harrowing drudgery of ‘It Came Back The Next Night’, a macabre drool of hefty bass and snarling, hissing percussion that echoes through the sewer tunnels.

Night Hag are cheerless, a dreary landscape riddled with treacherous potholes which entice you into pits of despair. Even with the more stable haste of ‘Strange Whispers From Beneath The Cypress’, there remains a reverberating grimness that chimes eternally through black sweating walls of gloom. Blusters will come and go, particularly in the burly percussion and there’s that strong cavernous odour of incantation density which then grinds to a foreboding slow leakage.

The atmospheric archaic lumber of the aptly titled ‘Staring Into The Ancient Chasm’ is indicative of the Night Hag sound, an utterly abyssal traipsing through the most sodden black trenches. There’s a hint of early Paradise Lost in those heavily silted blankets of despair, the guitars yawning and creaking to the hellish bell chimes. At its finale, the album presents us with an intriguing cover of Disembowelment’s ‘Excoriate’, a timely reminder as to how those cult Aussie death doomsters remain so influential.

Night Hag prowls with such ominous intent as Great Dismal Darkness lurks at the threshold of fear. It exists as a soundtrack to that precipice of horror; the infinite blackness, the bottomless pit and unfathomable void… the place where all shadows gather.

Neil Arnold

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