Following the surprise release of their sprawling new album, Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate, and the live premiere of the full 83 minute piece at Roadburn this past weekend, Bell Witch announce extensive Summer tours across U.K. and Europe followed by North America in the Fall. “We can’t wait to be on tour performing ‘The Clandestine Gate’ and for this piece to further blossom in the live arena,” tells bassist Dylan Desmond. Tickets go on sale this Friday, April 28 at 10AM Local Here. See below for a full list of dates.
For more than a decade, the renowned Pacific Northwestern doom metal band Bell Witch has sent tides surging over the seawalls of the song form, unraveling conventional expectations about the ways music stations itself in time to absorb a listener’s attention. Rather than seek catharsis, the duo’s songs heave themselves through time at a glacial pace, staving off resolution in favor of a trancelike capsule eternity. Invoking both boundlessness and claustrophobia in the same charged gesture, Bell Witch cultivates a sense of time outside of time, an oasis inside an increasingly frenetic media culture.
The newly released, Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate, like 2017’s lauded Mirror Reaper, is a single 83-minute track — a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future’s Shadow.
“Eventually, the end of the last album will be looped around to the first to make a circle,” says Desmond of the triptych. “It can be continuously looped, like a day cycle. This would be dawn. The next one would be noon. The following one would be sundown, with dawn and sundown both having something of night.”
The expansive scale of Future’s Shadow gave Bell Witch more leeway to plumb themes that have long percolated throughout their work. The concept of eternal return — that time doesn’t end and death doesn’t punctuate life, but both go on forever in an infinite loop no one can remember — inflected the development of The Clandestine Gate after Desmond encountered the idea in Nietzche’s book The Gay Science. The glacially paced films of 20th century Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky similarly supplied a framework for the movements of The Clandestine Gate and Future’s Shadow as a whole. Simple actions — carrying a candle across a room, tossing a metal nut into an overgrown field — carry life-and-death weight, a strategy echoed in Bell Witch’s suspension of minimal melodies across planetary expanses.
The immense gravity of a work like The Clandestine Gate allows these ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive — not just a philosophical exercise, but an embodied truth. By slowing down both their creative process and the tempo of the music itself, Bell Witch digs even deeper into their long standing focus: the way life spills on inside its minuscule container, both eternal and fleeting, a chord that echoes without resolution. As both the beginning and end of the Future’s Shadow triptych, The Clandestine Gate opens a new chapter in Bell Witch’s macroscopic minimalism: the start of a yawning orbit around an increasingly massive core.
Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate is available now across all digital retailers here. Physical formats (CD, Cassette, Vinyl) will be available in stores on June 9 via Profound Lore.
Bell Witch Live Dates:
May 26: Seattle, WA – Northwest Terrorfest
Aug 11: Jaromer, CZ – Brutal Assault Fest
Aug 12: Regensburg, DE – Void Fest
Aug 14: Antwerp, BE – Kavka
Aug 15: London, UK – Oslo
Aug 16: Sheffield, UK – Corporation
Aug 17: Manchester, UK – Bread Shed
Aug 18: Bristol, UK – ArcTanGent Festival
Aug 20: Saint Nolff – Motocultor
Aug 22: Nijmegen, NL – Doomroosje #
Aug 23: Cologne, DE – Gebaude 9 #
Aug 24: Karlsruhe, DE – P8 #
Aug 25: Winterthur, CZ – Gaswerk #
Aug 26: Lonate Ceppino, IT – Black Inside #
Aug 27: Bologna, IT – Cinema Perla #
Aug 29: Wroclaw, PL – Stary Klasztor #
Aug 30: Leipzig, DE – UT Connewitz #
Aug 31: Berlin, DE – Lido #
Sep 01: Hannover, DE – Cafe Glocksee #
Sep 03: Copenhagen, DK – Killtown Deathfest #
Oct 11: Vancouver, BC – Rickshaw Theatre *
Oct 12: Calgary, AB – Dickens *
Oct 13: Edmonton, AB – The Starlite Room *
Oct 14: Saskatoon, SK – Louis’ *
Oct 15: Winnipeg, MN – Park Theatre *
Oct 17: St Paul, MN – Turf Club *
Oct 18: Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall *
Oct 19: Iowa City, IA – Gabe’s *
Oct 20: Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village *
Oct 21: Detroit, MI – Smalls *
Oct 22: Toronto, ON – Trinity St. Paul’s Church Sanctuary *
Oct 24: Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa *
Oct 25: Portland, ME – SPACE *
Oct 26: Boston, MA – Sonia *
Oct 27: New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge *
Oct 28: Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church Sanctuary *
Oct 29: Baltimore, MD – Ottobar *
Oct 31: Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle *
Nov 01: Atlanta, GA – Boggs Social & Supply *
Nov 02: New Orleans, LA – Santos *
Nov 03: Houston, TX – Black Magic Social Club *
Nov 04: Austin, TX – The Parish *
Nov 05: Dallas, TX – Texas Theatre *
Nov 07: Albuquerque, NM – Sister *
Nov 08: Denver, CO – Marquis *
Nov 09: Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge *
Nov 10: Boise, ID – El Korah Shrine *
