There’s something a little eerie about the way the band Witch Post came together. A few years back, Scottish singer-songwriter Dylan Fraser found himself traveling regularly from Edinburgh to London, and would use the five-hour train journey to listen to new music; after stumbling upon Alaska Reid’s 2020 EP Big Bunny, and then covering one of the American musician’s tracks on his Instagram stories, they set a date for a writing session while Reid was visiting London from her hometown of Los Angeles.
The night before they were due to hit the studio, they bumped into each other at a Charli XCX gig. Then, after getting to chatting, they realized they both grew up in towns of the same name: Reid in the rural city of Livingston, Montana; Fraser in the town of Livingston, just west of Edinburgh. And then, after they started making music together and were struggling to think of a name, Reid visited a folk museum in northern England and discovered a “witch post”—a 17th-century superstition that involves carving crosses onto your fireplace to prevent witches from coming down the chimney and wreaking havoc in your home. Reid kissed it and sent a picture to Fraser, who pointed out that the carving was actually the St. Andrew’s saltire: the heraldic symbol found on the Scottish flag.
“There have been quite a few witchy, weird little happenings along the way,” says Fraser over Zoom from his home in London. Reid, who joins the call from Los Angeles, adds: “It’s felt a little weird at times, but it’s always felt easy.”
Their music as Witch Post is the product of this rare and somewhat mysterious creative alchemy—which you can chalk up partly to their shared obsession with folklore and storytelling, but also to the way their voices intertwine and even, at moments, begin to blur. You can hear all of that on their new EP, Butterfly, announced today and releasing on March 20 via Partisan Records.
The first single, “Worry Angel”—also out today—begins with a metallic guitar strum that could be straight off a ’90s alt-rock anthem, accompanied by Fraser’s urgent, anxious croon: “I’ve done everything right, so why is everything wrong?” Reid’s airy, richly textured vocals float in on the chorus: “Why do you worry, angel?” As the song unfolds, their voices begin to braid together like twin strands of ivy—a Scottish lilt and a Montana twang—creeping across a hard stone wall of fuzzy grunge guitars. It’s gorgeous to listen to, a little cryptic, and so catchy. (All are running themes in Witch Post’s body of work, which, since the duo joined forces in 2024, has included a handful of singles and an EP, Beast, released last April.)