Saltpig have just released a new video for “Burn The Witch.” The two-piece – featuring producer/multi-instrumentalist Mitch Davis (Damon Albarn, U2, Mark Lanegan) and drummer Fabio Alessandrini (ex-Annihilator) – take the track from their self-titled, debut album. Previously surfacing in digital and limited cassette formats in 2023, it is due out via Heavy Psych Sounds Records on May 31st, and will be issued in limited colored vinyl edition, classic vinyl edition, CD. Keep reading below for the new video and more from Saltpig.
Pre-order Saltpig here.
About the debut album, Mitch Davis says: “It’s melodic but embraces dissonance. It’s noisy and dirty and evil sounding. Underproduced and real. Recorded onto analogue tape and pushing the levels with a “distortion is never bad” ethos.”
Davis has been working as a producer and recording engineer with artists including LA Guns, Damon Albarn, Billy Squier, Stephen Malkmus, Mark Lanegan, Sunbomb and U2, but Saltpig is a very different animal. For his own band, Mitch created a much darker sound. When he started writing the Saltpig tracks, it pretty quickly turned into this debut album. Most of the tracking was done in their respective studios, with Fabio in Italy, and Mitch in New York where he’d do all of the final recording, production and mixing.
With Saltpig’s debut album, Mitch Davis takes a dark journey into occult themes and horrific storylines dancing around melodic yet dissonant layers of noisy guitars, overdriven bass and floating drums. The album forgoes the expected fuzz sounds for a palette of tones that largely disregards genre for Saltpig to build songs that are simply evil and completely human. It’s fully embracing a love of distortion and feedback in all forms while pushing tape to its breaking point. The band plays with different tempos and tunings as a way mostly to keep things interesting for themselves, creating what feels akin to a greatest hits album where the songs take on different personalities but feel completely like Saltpig songs at the same time. They find influences from early Judas Priest, Mercyful Fate and Black Sabbath at a time when metal was still finding its way.
More from Saltpig:
Saltpig is a bit of a mystery. The band just showed up seemingly out of nowhere, album in hand, with the music loudly speaking for itself. As it soon became known, Saltpig is a two-person band with Fabio Alessandrini (former Annihilator) on drums and Mitch Davis handling vocals, guitar and all of the other layers of noise that can be heard on the record. The music that came out of this pairing has elements of doom/stoner/psych/occult metal and others, but they didn’t go into it with anything that specific in mind. They just make the music they want to hear.
Rewind to an era before metal began its evolution towards greater precision, bigger drums and more robust production, then imagine that evolution taking a different turn. Producer, guitarist and frontman Mitch Davis tries to put himself in that place where metal might be today if things had gone in a different direction. It’s neither nostalgic for the way music used to be, nor is it trying to follow any trends of today. It’s more of a “make the music we want to hear” than a purposeful innovation. While familiar, it doesn’t quite fit neatly into an existing metal sub-genre. The idea was always “don’t try to be like other bands, but don’t be different just for the sake of being different.” The result is an album that means a lot of different things to different people. But to Saltpig, they are just making music.
Saltpig is:
Mitch Davis – vocals, guitar, noises
Fabio Alessandrini – drums
Follow Saltpig:
https://www.fuckinsaltpig.com/
https://www.facebook.com/saltpigband
https://saltpig.bandcamp.com/album/saltpig
https://www.instagram.com/saltpigband/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0kN7OhOCxLnVYg7gfCtn0A