Richard HolmesSong
Night Comes Down
Artist
Warning
Warning backstory
There are cult bands. And then there’s Warning.
Watching From A Distance, their 2006 album, is widely revered as a doom classic. The follow-up to 1999’s The Strength To Dream, it was a slow-mo descent into utter darkness. The Essex act sounded like no one else out there.
The band were put on hiatus in 2009, with singer/guitarist Patrick Walker focusing on acting and his 40 Watt Sun project, only to return to the stage in 2017 to play Watching… on festival stages, including Roadburn’s.
And last year, Warning announced that they’d returned to the studio to record a long-awaited new album.
The first taste of the forthcoming opus, Rituals of Shame, hit us last month in the form of Stations.
And now they’ve unveiled Night Comes Down, as anticipation builds for the band’s third full-length.
In Patrick Walker’s own words
“Whenever I’m asked to say something about a song, I immediately find myself faced with a kind of writer’s paralysis. I tend to be rather reticent when it comes my songs’ meanings, and what else can I say about something that I’ve spent such a long time writing in an effort to articulate some thought or feeling as succinctly and as truthfully as I can?
“I also tend to recoil at the general perception that precedes my music, but yet looking back over the lyric now, it’s without doubt one of the most irredeemably dark things I’ve written. The first verse and chorus tumbled out in a single stream of consciousness. I decided to keep it exactly as written, and phrased it to fit the music. There are maybe only two or three other instances where I’ve done this.
“Interestingly, when we were mixing the album demos last June, we realized that this song contains the only four seconds of hi-hat on the album. It certainly wasn’t a conscious thing, but must be reflective of my particular distaste for what Steve Albini once called “a truly satanic instrument”.
“The title of this song is not a nod to Judas Priest, as one journalist asked me. It hadn’t even occurred to me.”
The verdict on Night Comes Down
Warning’s mastery of doom architecture remains undiminished.
Night Comes Down has all of the delicate beauty that made Watching… so compelling, while Walker’s distinctive, haunting tones only add to the song’s all-enveloping darkness. Its heaviness comes from the soul.
If this – and Stations – are anything to go by, Rituals of Shame could be the comeback of the decade.
What’s next for Warning?
Rituals of Shame is set for a June 19 release via Relapse Records. And the band are hitting Europe this summer for a string of festival appearances. You can catch them at Red Smoke Festival in Pleszew (July 10 to 12), Beyond The Gates in Bergen (July 29 to August 1), Frantic Festival at Francavilla Al Mare (August 13 to 15) and KULT in Helsinki (September 4).
Warning photo by Gobinder Jhitta.