By Olivia Horn
Dear listeners,
Olivia here — I’m today’s guest playlister, a Culture desk contributor and a certified lover of the fall.
This selection of songs for spooky season was born on the drive back from a weekend jaunt in the Hudson River Valley, during which I indulged in a number of autumnal traditions: apple picking, leaf peeping, singing in the car getting lost upstate. Unfortunately, I was a week too late to catch the witch paddle in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., a delightful annual event that assembles a floating coven on the Hudson. These witches have the right idea, if you ask me: A paddle board sounds much more comfortable than a broomstick.
Witches have many identities in the contemporary popular imagination: They are practitioners of modern paganism, historical emblems of feminist resistance, the foundation of a whole micro-economy on Etsy. For some, “witchy” is simply a byword for feeling a little dark and mysterious. This playlist celebrates witchiness across a spectrum of meanings, just in time for Halloween.
Got sage on the door,
Olivia
Listen along while you read.
1. Kate Bush: “Waking the Witch”
Kate Bush’s entanglements with the supernatural long preceded her star-rejuvenating sync in Netflix’s paranormal thriller “Stranger Things,” which pushed her 1985 song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” back onto the Hot 100 a few years back. “Waking the Witch,” from the same album, is Bush’s thrillingly cinematic enactment of a witch trial, dramatized by icy, frenetic synths, driving guitar and a demonic witch hunter voice that duets with Bush’s feathery soprano. Like “Running Up That Hill,” it’s a goth-pop epic with feminist subtext: Bush has described the song as being about “the fear of women’s power.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Madeline Kenney: “Witching Hour”
The air feels crisp on this diaphanous cut from the Oakland indie-rocker Madeline Kenney’s 2017 debut. In the song’s homemade music video, Kenney and company skate around town scouting Halloween decorations. Cozy!
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Princess Nokia: “Brujas”
Princess Nokia flexes her witchy credentials on this 2016 track: “I’m that Black-a-Rican bruja straight out from the Yoruba!” The rapper, who grew up in Manhattan and identifies as Yoruba, Taíno and Puerto Rican, braids together multiple strands of cultural heritage here, including Santería — a syncretic religious tradition with roots in Cuba and West Africa — and ’90s New York hip-hop. Witchcraft surfaces in Nokia’s latest work, too, though with a more ominous tone: “I am convicted of witchcraft, and now I burn at the stake,” she raps on one song from her new album, “Girls.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Björk: “Pagan Poetry”
The Icelandic icon is more often likened to an alien or an elf than to a witch — though she did play the latter in Robert Eggers’s 2022 film “The Northman.” Before that, Björk appeared in Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” which she filmed while working on her 2001 record, “Vespertine.” “Pagan Poetry,” a sexy lullaby that spins carnal desire into a silvery, mystical web, is one of that album’s highlights. Pleasure becomes its own kind of magic.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Alice Phoebe Lou: “Witches”
This jaunty track from the Berlin-based singer-songwriter Alice Phoebe Lou leans into the witch as an archetype of feminine strength and independence: “I’m one of those witches, babe,” she coos in the chorus, “Just don’t try to save me, ’cause I don’t wanna be saved.” Sparkling with analog tape crackle, the song radiates warmth. Aesthetically, it leans more Kiki than Blair Witch.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Jenny Hval featuring Laura Jean: “Accident”
Where some see strength and independence, others see deviance. On her 2019 album “The Practice of Love,” Jenny Hval invokes the witch as a caricature of a woman who strays from norms — namely, child rearing. The skittering synth track “Accident” relays a conversation between two women without children about abrasive social expectations that try to strip them of their potential: “She was told she was the closest her mother came to magic / She is made for other things.” The effect is trance-inducing and lightly surreal.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Half Waif: “Lavender Burning”
One thing I love about witches: They don’t skimp on the aromatics. Nandi Rose Plunkett, the singer and producer who records as Half Waif, wrote “Lavender Burning” in tribute to her grandmother’s habit of boiling lavender from the garden on her stove. “The first time I noticed her doing this, it struck me as a kind of magic: The small black cauldron bubbling with a piece of the earth,” Plunkett recalled.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Dora Jar: “Spell”
The Los Angeles folk-pop singer Dora Jar is attuned to the spiritual potency of seasonal change on this stirring, Halloween-coded single from 2022. That was the year that I failed to get into “Stick Season”; I listened to this instead.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Spellling: “Queen of Wands”
A character from the minor arcana lends her name to this song by the enchanting pop experimentalist Tia Cabral — a chilly, gothic synth number that situates Cabral securely within Kate Bush’s lineage. The lyrics are minimal, but center on a question: “Are you afraid of the power?” There’s no doubt that the power in question is Cabral’s own.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
10. Salem: “Sick”
Here are all the hallmarks of witch house, the influential electronic music subgenre that the polarizing group Salem is credited with catalyzing: sinister, pitched-down vocals, ironically deployed choral sacred music and booming, trap-inspired drums. This song is a perfect potion to fry some brain cells.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
11. Florence + the Machine: “Which Witch”
From contemporary pop’s pre-eminent sorceress, a thunderous telling of a modern-day witch trial. While the charges aren’t specified, the stakes are clear: Florence Welch’s narrator is “chained and shackled,” haunted by visions of obliterating (or are they cathartic?) flames. Welch often bellows like a woman possessed, but here that metaphor is especially potent. It relates to an idea central in her songcraft — that music itself is “like a magic spell in order to exorcise something from yourself,” as she once put it.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“11 Songs for the Witching Hour” track list
Track 1: Kate Bush, “Waking the Witch”
Track 2: Madeline Kenney, “Witching Hour”
Track 3: Princess Nokia, “Brujas”
Track 4: Björk, “Pagan Poetry”
Track 5: Alice Phoebe Lou, “Witches”
Track 6: Jenny Hval featuring Laura Jean, “Accident”
Track 7: Half Waif, “Lavender Burning”
Track 8: Dora Jar, “Spell”
Track 9: Spellling, “Queen of Wands”
Track 10: Salem, “Sick”
Track 11: Florence + the Machine, “Which Witch”
The post 11 Songs for the Witching Hour appeared first on New York Times.
