Witch House roundup
The Best Witch House Artists to Know
None of these artists had a label deal or a plan — just cheap software and a sound nobody else was making yet. Here's who actually built witch house.
None of the people on this list had a label deal, a PR team or a plan when they started. They had cheap software, a bedroom, and a sound nobody else was quite making yet — which is exactly the kind of story I love writing about. Here are the artists who actually built witch house, one self-released track at a time.
Salem
The Michigan trio of Jack Donoghue, John Holland and Heather Marlatt is the name almost every history of this sound comes back to. Their 2010 debut album, King Night, released through IAMSOUND Records, fused slowed hip-hop rhythms, gothic melody, distorted synths and bleak, half-buried vocals into something that felt genuinely new at the time — and it remains the record most retrospectives treat as the genre's defining statement. Salem didn't invent every ingredient in that recipe, but they were the ones who synthesised it into a sound other people could immediately recognise and build on.
Pictureplane
Travis Egedy, the Denver artist behind Pictureplane, matters for two reasons. Musically, his 2009 record Dark Rift helped establish the style before the better-known 2010 wave arrived. Rhetorically, he's the person most widely credited with coining the term "witch house" itself, reportedly describing the sound — at least half-jokingly — as "occult-based house music." Whether he meant it as a real genre name or a throwaway line that stuck is still debated, but either way, his fingerprints are on both the sound and its name.
oOoOO
Chris Dexter's project oOoOO took the scene in a sparser, more spectral direction. His self-titled 2010 release is built from chopped vocal samples, minimal dark electronics and slow, weighted rhythmic motion — less abrasive than some of his peers, more haunted than harsh. It's one of the clearest documents of witch house's quieter, more atmospheric strain, and a useful listen if the genre's noisier corners aren't your thing.
White Ring
Kendra Malia and Bryan Kurkimilis, recording as White Ring, represent the genre's harder, more abrasive edge. Early work including the track "Roses" and their album Black Earth That Made Me leaned into clipped percussion, ominous drones and damaged vocal textures — proof that witch house could sound genuinely confrontational, not just moody. If Salem's gothic melodicism is one pole of the genre, White Ring's industrial bite is close to the other.
Balam Acab
Alec Koone's Balam Acab pulled the sound somewhere else again. His 2011 album Wander/Wonder is fluid, aquatic and emotionally vulnerable, closer at points to ambient music or experimental pop than to anything you'd call abrasive. It's often cited as one of the strongest expansions of the style beyond its founding template, and proof that a scene this loosely defined had real room to grow in unexpected directions.
Holy Other
By 2012, Holy Other's Held showed just how far the sound could travel from its harsher origins — intimate vocal fragments, spacious production and a kind of romantic melancholy that owes as much to R&B as to goth. It's a genuinely lovely record, and a good reminder that this scene was never as narrowly defined as its scarier imagery suggested.
Ritualz and the Harder Fringe
Jorge Rojas's project Ritualz represents a more explicitly industrial, occult-leaning continuation of the sound, with releases that lean further into darkwave and underground electronic territory than the genre's 2010 core. Artists working this fringe are a reminder that witch house never really stopped — it just kept mutating in smaller, harder-to-find corners of the internet.
| Artist | Known for | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Salem | King Night (2010) | Gothic, slowed, definitive |
| Pictureplane | Dark Rift (2009) | Named the genre, pre-dates its peak |
| oOoOO | Self-titled (2010) | Sparse, spectral, atmospheric |
| White Ring | Black Earth That Made Me (2010) | Harsh, industrial, abrasive |
| Balam Acab | Wander/Wonder (2011) | Fluid, ambient, emotionally open |
| Holy Other | Held (2012) | Intimate, R&B-adjacent, melancholic |
If you'd like to hear these artists' records in a sensible order rather than jumping around, our guide to the essential albums lays out exactly that, and our history of the genre puts all these names in proper chronological context.
The Bottom Line
What strikes me most about this list is how different these artists actually sound from each other — gothic and slow, harsh and industrial, ambient and fragile. They got lumped under one name because they shared a moment, an aesthetic and an online network, not because they were making the same record twice. That range is exactly why the sound is worth digging into properly rather than treating it as one flavour.
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