For all we know, we may already be past it.Ĭollapse is the major theme of Fires in Heaven, the band’s first album since 2010’s King Night. Seeing that funnel cloud through the lens of a camera speeding toward it, it’s hard not to remember how many catastrophes we’re rocketing towards as a nation, a civilization, a species, and how close we are to the point where none of us-not even the most powerful people on the planet-have a say in how it turns out. Once you get close enough to a tornado, whether or not you end up in its path is out of your control. I punched the replay button again, then again. When a towering tunnel cloud, shot from terrifyingly too-close, breaks into frame while the song melts down for the final time, I felt a rush of weightlessness, the sickening vertiginous thrill of sudden freefall. In the video, Donoghue and John Holland-the group’s only other member since the departure of Heather Marlatt, who has said that she was pushed out but seems to have come to a reconciliation-chase tornadoes across the plains of Oklahoma and Texas, soaking wet and chain-smoking, looking as exhausted and spiritually wrung-out as two people stepping into the daylight after an all-night binge.

It feels landscape-sized despite clocking in shy of three minutes. The snippet of “Starfall” that they posted on Instagram didn’t prepare me for the whole thing: a swooning shoegaze-emo-rap hybrid that climbs to heart-rending highs before melting down in a psychedelic waterfall of cascading rave synths. Unlike nearly everyone else making music right now, Salem seems to get what the new world we’re in is all about. The haunted, paranoid death trip they evoked a decade ago in the “King Night” video has become the national mood. Everyday life has become noticeably darker, more chaotic, increasingly feral. The idea that anyone in the middle of all that could even care about an intentionally obscure, notoriously divisive witch house project having a comeback seemed deeply fucked up.īut the world has become noticeably more Salem-like in the eight years they’ve been away, and not just because-despite breaking up on the verge of crossing over and a concerted critical effort to discredit them artistically-their aesthetic vision has managed to permeate pop culture and fashion. Before the day was over, 901 more Americans would be added to our city-sized population of COVID-19 dead. There were children locked in cages on the border, a president stoking civil war, genocides breaking out around the globe. The West Coast was on fire-it hadn’t even been a week since the skies over the Pacific Northwest turned an Old Testament shade of orange. Given the rest of the news that day, Salem announcing their return after eight years of near-total silence seemed cosmically trivial. The following week a video post appeared of the duo’s Jack Donoghue driving a pickup truck through a nighttime lightning storm, scored by a delicate, uncharacteristically tender, synthpop-inflected ballad, along with the caption “SALEM – STARFALL *OUT NOW*.” Back in September, a blue-checkmark Salem account appeared on Instagram with a YouTube link to a forty-minute-long mixtape called STAY DOWN.

Days of the week song starfall