Salem and the Sound of Things Burning Slowly

Salem came out of Traverse City, Michigan and made music that sounded like hip-hop being dragged underwater. Jack Donoghue, Heather Marlatt, and John Holland had been chopping and screwing their beats before the sound had a name—witch house, they called it eventually, a genre tag that stuck and then became embarrassing in the way genre tags always do. King Night, their 2010 debut, is the record that most fully captures what they were doing: tempos slowed to something pharmaceutical, vocals processed into a genderless fog, industrial grime laid under hip-hop rhythms until the two became one indistinguishable thing.

It doesn’t sound like music made for careful listening. It sounds like music made for a specific 4 AM in a room where the lights have been off for hours. Sick, Trapdoor, the title track—none of these songs build or resolve. They hover. Something about the static quality, the sense that everything is decaying at a controlled rate, felt genuinely strange when the album dropped and still does.