Bandcamp A Wicked Huntsman is a folk record the way a séance is a dinner party. The debut from Food for the Wyrm, the project of California singer-songwriter Beau James Wilding, gathers original compositions, reimagined traditionals and a pair of folk covers, then ties six of its eight tracks to six flowers native to the Irish countryside, each standing for a different wound: betrayal, loss, shame, cruelty, addiction, ignorance. The whole thing is bookended by two drone instrumentals named for stages of alchemy, the blackening at the start and the reddening at the end, so the record literally maps a passage from darkness toward something like clarity. It is a lot of concept. What is surprising is how much the music carries it.
Recorded live in a room in rural Ireland and finished in California, the album sounds handmade in the best sense. The instruments are acoustic and earthy, resonator guitar, foot-stomp, bodhrán, threaded through with fuzzed drones and the occasional black-metal scald, and crucially the whole thing is allowed to breathe, mastered with an honesty that has largely gone out of fashion. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” turns the old gospel-blues into dry, stomping dark Americana that climbs from a single voice to a wall of screams. “The Lowlands of Holland” rises out of a ritual hush into atmospheric doom. “Unfortunate Rake”, the ancestor of every dying-cowboy ballad, gets dragged into pagan folk metal without losing the grief at its centre.
Wilding’s voice is the through-line, a hoarse, theatrical rasp that stays intelligible even at its most ragged, and it sells the record’s central bet: that you can scream about the worst things that happen to you and still be reaching toward the light. Not all of it lands equally. The two ambient bookends, “Negrito” and “Rubedo”, are more concept than song, dense and fatiguing in a way the folk material never is, and “The Bells of Sleep” drifts a touch thin. But the misses are the cost of a record this willing to be strange, and the hits are genuinely moving.
There is nothing else quite like A Wicked Huntsman in this year’s pile, and that alone earns it your time. A folk record with a doom heart and a black-metal throat, about turning grief and damage into something you can carry. Flawed, fearless, and quietly one of the most distinctive debuts of 2026.
A Wicked Huntsman fuses traditional and original folk with doom, drone and black metal, and its great strength is production that actually breathes, organic, dynamic, and pointedly free of loudness-war crushing across the core songs. Acoustic instruments are cleanly separated, resonator guitar and foot-stomp and percussion given real space, with fuzzed drones and harsh, theatrical vocals layered over the top, the screams kept upfront and intelligible. The dynamic writing is the highlight: “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” builds from a single dry voice to a wall of screams, “The Lowlands of Holland” and “Unfortunate Rake” move between ritual hush and dense eruption without ever collapsing into mud. The two ambient instrumental bookends, “Negrito” and “Rubedo”, are the weak points, sub-bass drones run loud and dense enough to fatigue where the folk material stays open and alive.
Standout tracks: Nobody’s Fault But Mine, The Lowlands of Holland, Unfortunate Rake
