Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
For the better part of two decades Maria Brink has draped her band in ritual and candlelight, in veils and horns and Salem-trial pageantry, so the real surprise with album number nine is not that it is called Witch but that it took her this long to plant the word squarely on the sleeve.
This is ground she has been circling since at least 2017’s Ritual, a full concept record about a witch on trial; Witch is the moment she stops circling and simply stakes the claim.
It arrives on 28 August via Better Noise Music the band’s first record for the label after a career that has passed through Century Media, Atlantic and BMG, and their first full-length since 2023’s Godmode. Brink frames it without much ambiguity: “Witch is my declaration of inner transformation,” she says, one “about embracing the duality within taking pain, persecution and struggle, and alchemising them into strength and power.” If that reads like a mission statement you have heard from her before, that is the point. The whole In This Moment project has always run on turning wounds into war paint. The question Witch has to answer is whether the ninth telling still lands with the force of the first.
Witch is also the most guest-heavy thing the band has ever put its name to. Dayseeker’s Rory Rodriguez turns up on “I Want To Believe,” Kim Dracula brings the chaos to “Heretic,” and Kat Von D lends a voice to a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall.” For good measure the record signs, off with a reading of Nine-Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have,” which tells you plenty about where Brink’s compass points. Covers have long been an In This Moment signature – Phil Collins, Björk, a stadium singalong once shared with Lzzy Hale and Taylor Momsen but two on a single record, both bearing famous names, is a statement about lineage as much as taste. Eleven tracks, then, and worth walking through before any verdict.
Shame opens the record, and with Fulk at the desk it is built for impact rather than atmosphere. As a scene-setter it carries the album’s central charge – shame weaponised, turned outward, reclaimed rather than swallowed – and it drops you into the world of the title with no throat-clearing. On the evidence of its producer’s other work here, expect a taut, chorus-forward statement of intent that gets to the point and trusts the hook to do the rest. It is the sound of a band that knows exactly what a first impression is for.
I Want To Believe brings the first guest, and it is a shrewd pairing. Rory Rodriguez of Dayseeker has one of the more affecting clean voices in the post-hardcore field, and setting his melody against Brink’s theatrical menace gives the song two temperatures to move between – the yearning and the threat sharing the same room. Churko’s production leans into that contrast, and where a lesser duet just hands each singer a verse, this one sounds written to make the two voices need each other. An early sign that the collaborations on Witch are chosen for chemistry, not just for the guest list.
Crawl was the single chosen to unveil the album, and it plays to the band’s oldest strengths without apology: a heavy, industrial-leaning stomp with the low end shoved to the front and Brink prowling from a hushed murmur up to a full-throated roar. Under the theatre it is a genuinely pointed song – a reckoning aimed squarely at abusers, built, in her words, on the notion that those who dominate and cause pain will reap what they sow. Fulk keeps the groove physical and the chorus outsized, and Michael Lombardi’s video hands it the horror-movie staging this band have always favoured. It is the most immediate thing on offer and, tellingly, the one they led with. On sheer force it earns the spot.
Into The Dark reads, on title and placement alike, as the record’s first proper descent – the point where the front-loaded aggression gives way to something murkier. Back under Churko’s hand, this is where you would expect Witch to widen its palette, trading the single-ready punch for atmosphere and dread. In the band’s catalogue the mid-album mood piece has often hidden their best writing, the moment the pantomime drops, and something colder shows through, and everything about where this sits suggests it is angling for exactly that.
Sleeping With The Enemy was the track that properly signalled a new album was on the way, arriving in the spring of 2026 to pull the band back into view a good while after “Heretic” had first surfaced. It sets the mould the later singles follow: another Fulk production welding a hooky, radio-literate chorus to the band’s gothic-industrial weight. There is a streak of self-preservation running through it – the enemy you share a bed, or a mirror, with – and Brink sells the paranoia with the theatrical relish that has always been her strongest card. It does not reinvent the band so much as remind you, briskly, why they work, and as a line in the sand for this new era it did its job.
Wrapped Around Your Finger keeps the tension in the domestic and the psychological, its title promising the sort of push-and-pull power play Brink has written about for years – control, obsession, the fine line between the two. With Churko producing, this is one of the record’s slinkier, more seductive turns, the menace dialled down to a simmer. If it lands, it will be as the album’s exhale between heavier neighbours; the sort of deep cut that rewards a second listen more than a first.
Heretic is the wild card, and by design. The Kim Dracula collaboration was the earliest glimpse of this era, and it is the most chaotic thing on the track list – two performers who thrive on unpredictability handed the same three minutes and told to misbehave. It is short, sharp, and deliberately unhinged, and where the singles either side of it are built for the chorus, this one is built for the whiplash. Whether it reads as a thrilling detour or a novelty will depend on your tolerance for Dracula’s genre-blender chaos, but there is no arguing it gives Witch a jolt of something genuinely unruly.
Father is the title that made me sit up. In This Moment gave us Mother in 2020, an entire album built around that archetype, so answering it now with Father feels like a deliberate closing of a loop – the other half of the family portrait, and knowing this band, unlikely to be a sentimental one. Everything in their history points to this being a heavier, more loaded reckoning than the name lets on. If Witch has a track carrying real thematic weight beyond the theatre, the smart money is on this one.
Without Me There’s No You arrives late and, on title alone, reads as the record’s most codependent, entangled moment – the kind of all-or-nothing declaration that can tip either into devotion or into threat, often within the same breath. Placed here in the running order it looks like the emotional peak before the covers close things out, and Churko’s more cinematic instincts would suit that job. It is the sort of song that, done right, becomes the one the faithful quote back at the band from the barrier.
Another Brick In The Wall is the record’s first cover and its boldest swing – Pink Floyd’s most quoted protest anthem, reworked with Kat Von D along for the ride. It is a big, recognisable target, and In This Moment, covers have always worked best when they bend the original to Brink’s theatrical world rather than simply photocopy it. The choice fits the album’s wider argument about power and control neatly enough; the risk is the one every famous cover runs, of inviting a comparison it can’t win. Handled with the right menace, though, it could be the moment casual listeners suddenly lean in.
Something I Can Never Have closes the record, and it is the most revealing choice on it. Reaching for Nine-Inch Nails’ bruised, piano-lit ballad – one of the most nakedly wounded things in Trent Reznor’s catalogue – tells you exactly which lineage In This Moment want to be measured against, and it is a long way from the aggression of the opening run. As a closer it promises catharsis over spectacle, the theatre finally dropping to leave something quieter and more human standing in the wreckage. If they land it, Witch goes out not on a snarl but on a wound, and that is the braver way to end.
What holds this together, or threatens not to, is the split personality baked into its credits. The Fulk tracks are lean, immediate, and built to travel; the Churko material is where the band sounds most like itself, patient, gothic, and strange. On the three tracks currently in the wild that division works in the record’s favour, giving Witch both a shop window and a set of back rooms. The risk, on paper, is coherence – whether a record assembled from two producers’ instincts and a rotating cast of guests hangs together as one statement or plays as a strong singles run with an interesting supporting cast. That is the one thing a track list cannot tell you, and the thing a full listen will decide.
What is not in doubt is the thesis. Every In This Moment record since Blood has been, in some sense, about Brink converting hostility into fuel, and Witch simply gives that alchemy its most on-the-nose title yet. The witch as persecuted figure and the witch as creator – victim and sovereign, the same person seen from opposite sides – is exactly the duality she keeps returning to, and there is something fitting about a band nine albums deep still mining the same seam and still, on the singles at least, sounding like they mean it. Consistency of vision has always been this band’s quiet superpower, and Witch looks set to be a very consistent record indeed.
Nine albums in, Brink is still casting herself as the figure the mob came for and the one who walks out of the fire intact. On this evidence, the flames suit her.
“Being a ‘witch’ means being a creator, connected to the universe, manifesting my own reality.” – Maria Brink
Witch – Track listing:
1. Shame
2. I Want To Believe (feat. Dayseeker)
3. Crawl
4. Into The Dark
5. Sleeping With The Enemy
6. Wrapped Around Your Finger
7. Heretic (feat. Kim Dracula)
8. Father
9. Without Me There’s No You
10. Another Brick In The Wall (Pink Floyd cover) (feat. Kat Von D)
11. Something I Can Never Have (Nine-Inch Nails cover)
Line-up:
Maria Brink – Lead vocals, piano
Chris Howorth – Lead guitar
Randy Weitzel – Rhythm guitar
Travis Johnson – Bass
Kent Diimmel – Drums
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5DsiCJMmtjzRsMWYQxmgCO
