The genre witch house started almost accidentally in 2009, when Travis Egedy of Pictureplane and Jonathan Coward of Shams came up with a tongue-in-cheek name to describe the dark dance music with “witchy, occult vibes” they were making. From there, it spread across the internet, becoming a micro-genre that included almost any electronic band that incorporated slow tempos, aggressive software drums, noise, drone, and shoegaze elements in their sound, and occult symbols and gothic imagery in their look. During its peak of popularity, around 2010, one of the biggest criticisms against witch house was how it was appropriating its signature screwed-down vocals and drum programming from Southern rap music. Four years (nearly two decades in internet-time) later, multiple independent rap movements are taking cues from formative witch-house groups like Crystal Castles, Salem, Crim3s, and White Ring, somehow keeping the seemingly obsolete genre alive and making some of the best, weirdest emo/goth/trap you’ll hear all fall.
LA-via-Virginia rapper Black Kray’s new album 700 DAGREEZ (released October 17, “Brick Squad Day,” the holiest of trap holidays)—his third full-length on his own Goth Money Records imprint—is just the latest VHS-lens glimpse into his weird world of raps about flip phones, depression, Nascar, and random facets of mid-’90s/early-’00s pop culture. Delivered in a hypnotic chant and a voice as slurred by blunts and opiates as it is warped by reverb and Auto-Tune…