Since as early as 2015, multi-disciplinary artist Mariano Chavez has been crafting strange, humanoid beings made of wasps nests, honeycombs, and shed snakeskin. Exhibited at New York City’s John Molloy Gallery alongside Mark Kindschi’s hammered steel pieces exploring “the interface between nature and the human species”, the encaustic mottled masks and busts that adorned the Transfigurations showcase shared a common thread of arcane mysticism when displayed among the museum relics of indigenous artefacts and Native American art.

‘The Caller’, as the piece was titled in the Transfigurations exhibit, takes centre stage on the front cover of Shadow Swamps, alongside a host of Chavez’s unsettling entities of daubed wax and moulted skin. Being one half of art collaborative Teeth Agency along with London producer and Gorillaz keyboardist Jesse Hackett, their multi-media explorations of the macabre have branched into a musical project that fuses afrofutrist instrumentation with deep, industrial soundscapes serving as soundtracks for Chavez’s striking visuals. Following 2020’s self-titled debut, Metal Preyers has teamed up with Ugandan label and collective Nyege Nyege Tapes once again for another experimental narrative, this time concerning a father and daughter navigating a haunted swamp fraught with eerie creatures and shadowy dangers.

Shadow Swamps presents 14 tracks that act as chapters in the protagonists’ journey through the mysterious marshland, each new event or sudden peril vehicles to display Hackett’s disparate palette of influences and styles. Submersions into cavernous pits of harsh, sonic textures envelop chillingly on ‘Scream Dreamer’, a hissing trip of tape noise and concrète style collages that manifests like an aural case of pareidolia, terse rhythms and smoky beats all just-about spotted amid its amorphous haze. ‘Carpenters Cabin’ wields their love of John Carpenter via cinematic synths that spiral with horror arpeggios akin to The Fog, while hefts of abrasion are masterfully sculpted on ‘Wasp Faced Invasion’, ghostly xylophones and aged piano adding a fantastical touch that reinforces the album’s spectral aura but also keeps from being a purely disorienting drone. 

Listing Luboš Fišer as an inspiration on their Bandcamp, the album’s exercise in “pitch-black fairy tale” takes guidance from his score to the 1970 surrealist fantasy Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the chamber melodies and whimsical folk that enchant the Czechoslovak tale of a young girl’s traverse through a gothic dreamworld shift in and out of focus throughout Shadow Swamps like a narrative motif. Album opener ‘Murking Shadows’ harnesses this psychedelic hauntology with its disembodied guitar and foggy vocal samples, and ‘Slime Things Accent’ feels so authentically realised in the similar vein of hypnagogic psych that one can imagine it being sampled by acts like Broadcast or Burial. Hackett’s six-year-old daughter Wonder provides vocals at various points, furthering the fairy tale element that characterises the album and giving spiritual voice to ‘the daughter’ wading through the bog. Recording her voice on a smartphone, her unaware singing on ‘The Preyers Forest’ adds an ethereal air that straddles folklore fancy and cautious trepidation, whereas ‘Crate Creature’s elasticated and mangled production shape her vocals toward more menacing directions.

The strange figures shaped by nature’s detritus finally have a soundtrack befitting their ambiguous form and unknown origin. With Chavez’s arresting creations and Hackett’s intricate production, a true netherworld has been opened up, a sonic dimension of electronic immersion and evocative storytelling. Metal Preyers’ Shadow Swamps is a record that’s unearthed, excavated, and conjured; mirroring the beings that adorned Transfigurations with a piece of work that similarly inhabits a sincerely cabalistic plane.