The backstory is almost too good. In 2021, Innocent Darkness watched a Noire Antidote show and came away with a vocation. He didn't want a career or a brand. He wanted to play. That distinction matters enormously, because *Hexen* has the one quality that no marketing budget can counterfeit: it sounds like a person alone in a room, delighted. The gear is modest and loved, a Roland MC-707, a Novation Circuit Tracks, Bitwig, the Vital synth, and the music treats these tools the way a good woodsman treats an axe, with familiarity rather than reverence.
What emerges is witch house with the varnish stripped off. Where the genre's originators trafficked in glacial, occult sheen, Innocent Darkness lets the grain show. Bass moves like groundwater beneath the floorboards. Percussion lurches and stutters, half drum machine and half heartbeat. Synth pads gather in the corners of each track like mist off a field at dusk, and the layering is dense enough that you hear new shapes surface on the fifth listen, a detuned chime here, a smeared choral exhalation there. The artist describes the recording method as "a lot of sounds mixed as one," and that is exactly how it plays: not a collage but an amalgam, the seams welded shut.
The surprise, and the thing that lifts *Hexen* above mere atmospherics, is its mood. This is a record about October, about the light thinning and the forest bracing for winter, and the expected response would be dread. Instead the album radiates a strange, lopsided warmth. Dark and happy are supposed to be enemies; here they share a pew. Melodic figures that ought to curdle into menace tilt, at the last second, toward something close to joy, like a child's grin glimpsed under a hood. It recalls the best of Belgium's long tradition of melancholy dance music, from the cold-wave clubs of the eighties onward, where the dancefloor and the graveyard were separated by only a short taxi ride.
The Dutch phrase offered as the record's creed, *verdwaald in het zwart*, lost in the black, serves as both title card and thesis. Getting lost is the pleasure here. Nothing is explained, and nothing is polished into a shape that might please a playlist editor. The artist himself admits he can't quite say what the album is, insisting you simply have to listen to get the vibe. It's the most persuasive sales pitch imaginable, and refreshingly free of the guff that usually surrounds releases of this kind.
Its handmade quality counts as virtue, not limitation. The rough edges are the point; they signal a maker who is indifferent to fashion and therefore immune to it. In a genre prone to posing, *Hexen* feels sincere to its bones: a love letter to oaks, to stags, to the dark months, to the odd, comforting fact that the world keeps turning toward winter and we keep finding reasons to dance about it.
Two further releases are promised before the year is out, on 25 November and 17 December, with Belgian live shows to follow in 2027. On the evidence of *Hexen*, that is a prospect to relish. Light a candle, pull the curtains, and let the witches in. They come in peace, and they have brought a drum machine.