Since their formation in 2017, Witch Fever have been forging their own heavy music hybrid that defies expectation and evades categorisation. The foursome of Amy Hope Walpole (vocals/lyrics), Alex Thompson (bass), Alisha Yarwood (guitar) and Annabelle Joyce (drums) have leaped to the forefront of a flourishing UK alternative scene – touring with Biffy Clyro, IDLES, and Cassyette; covering Kerrang! with fellow “next gen” punks Bob Vylan and High Vis – without really fitting into any of its pockets. Their critically acclaimed 2022 debut Congregation bottled the raw energy they built a reputation for having live while pushing their sound to heavier extremes. Their anticipated follow-up, Fevereaten, expands that heaviness upwards and outwards – not just deepening their sound, but doubling its size.

Where Congregation was a largely instinctive affair, with some tracks still taking shape in the studio, Fevereaten was more premeditated. A thorough pre-production process saw them enter the studio with more “rigid goals” and a vision to branch out beyond the parameters of a four piece punk band. “We really wanted to sound bigger,” says Thompson. “We wanted to push our sound in ways that we wouldn’t be able to do if we were just playing in a room together.”

Produced by Chris W. Ryan (NewDad, Just Mustard, Enola Gay), Fevereaten leans into harsher influences and darker atmospherics. Thompson took more of a lead on the instrumentals, with the songs often beginning with bass and building out from there. It was a different way of working for Thompson, whose bass parts previously tended to follow Yarwood’s lead, and it prompted everyone to work in different ways too. Yarwood plays with noise and texture over riffs, while Joyce incorporates double bass pedal and more dynamic patterns. “We mapped it out a lot better this time,” says Joyce. “We had all the demos with the click, whereas last time we were still figuring stuff like that out in the studio. Having the structure of things down created a lot more room to play within them.”

Meanwhile, Walpole took a more intuitive approach to lyrics and vocals, ad-libbing or singing “gibberish” in the room to get the melody and then stepping away to fine tune the lyrics afterwards, rather than writing everything in advance – something she notes bears a similarity to how people in her church spoke in tongues as a way of communicating with god. The same went for harmonies, which she sang off the top of her head and went with whatever felt right – an altogether more “meditative” process. “It felt like my body was a part of it as well as my brain,” she says.

Bridging the gap between Congregation and their new chapter, opening track “Dead To Me” combines the breakneck punk Witch Fever cut their teeth playing with a newfound fullness and experimentalism. Lyrically, Walpole draws on her traumatic experiences growing up in the Charismatic Church, which informs much of Fevereaten’s themes as it did with Congregation. Here, though, she writes from a fresh emotional vantage point. Reflecting from a place of clarity rather than confusion, “Dead To Me” unleashes the anger of growing up with the pressures of being all the things girls are expected to be – sweet, cute, and compliant – while also being let down by the individuals and institutions that failed in their duty of care. This is despite the continued support of her parents, who also left the church and were exploited by it in their own ways. The lyrics are unforgiving and in your face, leaving little to read into. In Walpole’s words: “I’m just saying that all the elders in the church that let me down are dead to me!”

While Fevereaten has some thematic crossover with Congregation, the church plays a more conceptual role. Rather than detailing particular points of personal experience, religious imagery feeds into the album’s overarching theme of feeling watched or followed by something and not really knowing what – “maybe God, maybe a spirit?” – and then coming to the realisation that it’s the lingering presence of past traumas and mistakes. Taking things into the realm of the uncanny, religious imagery is mixed in with classic horror imagery; blood, fire, and Bible references commingle with hagstones, pagan symbolism, and poltergeists. Uncertainty hangs over everything, creating an atmosphere of paranoia and terror.

“In folklore, you’re meant to be able to hold up a hagstone and see spirits through the hole. It’s like a doorway to another world,” Walpole explains. “I don’t really believe in that, but I had this idea of carrying around a hagstone and feeling followed, like something was always on my back. When I was a child, it always felt like God was watching me and judging everything I was doing. But when I left the church and didn’t believe in God anymore, I still felt like I was being watched, because that’s what I’d been told growing up. That kind of thing doesn’t go away.”

They landed on Fevereaten as the album title in part because it captures the intensity of hysteria in a gothic horror sense – the feeling of being consumed by something and not being able to let it go. “I’ve always felt an affinity with female characters that are driven mad by whatever they’re going through,” says Walpole. “I had a difficult time growing up, and I had a lot of issues with my mental health as well. I always felt like there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

On that front, Walpole received an autism diagnosis early in the album writing process – a “holy shit” moment that suddenly explained everything she’d been dealing with. “For a while I was like, do I have PTSD from church? But I didn’t fit any of the criteria for PTSD. There’s obviously trauma there too, but there was just a lot of not knowing what the fuck was going on,” she explains. “I felt like I didn’t fit in in a lot of places, but I find forming relationships and maintaining friendships quite easy, which is one of the reasons why I wasn’t diagnosed for so long. I was just fed up with myself, and I spent a lot of time searching for an answer.”

Now that she’s been diagnosed, she says, “I understand and like myself more.” In turn, Fevereaten has more of a focus of healing and moving on – or at least trying to. The lyrics to the title track were written right after Walpole received her diagnosis. “I’m right on the edge, I’m fevereaten,” she roars in the chorus. “I just didn’t feel right in the world, and [the lyrics] are definitely informed by this feeling I’ve always had of being so close to breaking, but I never do.”

Work on Fevereaten began in 2022, right after Congregation wrapped. They did a writing week in Wales and an intense pre-production process with Ryan, setting the bones of each track in advance. They were also more thorough about their choices. “I was definitely quite pushy about us persevering with things we might have given up on before,” says Thompson. “We were a bit more studious about things If you don’t like something, you need to explain why, rather than just fucking it off.”

Sonically, Fevereaten turns the heat way up. They leaned into heavier influences, from classics like Deftones and Chelsea Wolfe, to hardcore bands like Knocked Loose and Fleshwater, to more left-field ambient artists like Ethel Cain and Grouper. With time to tease out new details in the studio, there’s a strangeness and subtlety to the songwriting – some small detail that knocks things off kilter. “In terms of building tension or conveying a feeling, it’s often by making something almost perfect or almost right, and then throwing something in there that isn’t,” says Thompson, who picked up the cello for the first time since she was a kid for this record, introducing another new dimension to the sound. “It’s an electric cello and we ran it through loads of pedals, so you can’t necessarily discern what it is, but I wanted to push us to have new tricks,” she explains. “It’s almost theatrical, in a way. That’s the kind of intensity we wanted.”

The cello, along with the intensity, comes through on “The Garden” – a genre change that draws Witch Fever away from their usual metal-adjacent influences and towards cinematic slowcore. Kicked off with a fuzzy alt rock riff, the instrumental sways between a trickle and a flood, while the lyrics subvert the Garden of Eden allegory into a paean for female liberation. Meanwhile, “Northstar”, “Burn To Hit” and “Reprise” double down on the darker sonics, pushing them to crushing proportions, while “Final Girl”, “Drink The Sap” and “See Ya Next Tuesday” split the difference, blending soft and harsh modes. There’s a tenderness to “Amber” and “Safe” that’s also new for Witch Fever, and comes partly from the lyrics. “Amber” is a slow sweep of gothic post-rock about a tour fling, while the shoegazey “Safe” is a bittersweet break-up ballad about a relationship turned friendship – more vulnerable territory for Walpole and, on previous releases, has come from an acrimonious perspective (as on “Reincarnate”).

Pulling together Fevereaten’s overarching themes, closer “I See It” is the most abstract song the band has ever written, avoiding the classic ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus’ structure in favour of something more textural. The instrumental builds into a wall of industrial noise, the minimal lyrics lean into the hagstone imagery and its accompanying feeling of being watched, while the vocals rise to a register that’s almost manic. To record them, Walpole and Thompson hiked to the top of Pendle Hill – symbolic for personal reasons as well as its connections to the Pendle Witch Trials – and screamed into a dictaphone. Vocal recordings taken on Pendle Hill actually appear throughout the album, with the band keen to incorporate elements from outside of the studio – in this case quite literally, as Walpole’s voice enters into a kind of conversation with the weather, both fighting against it to be heard and joining forces in its inability to be controlled.

By the end of “I See It,” the sound breaks down completely, leaving the album hanging on a cliff edge battered by rain, distortion, and sinister whispers. A glimpse through the hagstone to the other side, perhaps, and a wink towards where Witch Fever’s sound might go in the future.