{"id":657246,"date":"2026-06-25T09:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657246\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T09:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T09:22:12","slug":"all-them-witches-interview-house-of-mirrors-and-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/657246\/","title":{"rendered":"All Them Witches interview: House Of Mirrors and the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s six years since All Them Witches<\/a> released their last album, Nothing As The Ideal<\/a>. That\u2019s six years of massive changes on the world stage, from presidents to pandemics, dubious wars to heroic Moon explorations. For the band, on a personal level it\u2019s been all change, too. When frontman Charles Michael Parks Jr (just Parks to those who know him) eventually joins Classic Rock and guitarist Ben McLeod on Zoom, he\u2019s on the porch of his home in the wilds of rural Arkansas, \u201csomewhere in the Ouachita mountains\u201d, where he and his wife live an outdoorsy existence and their only friend is an elderly tractor driver.<\/p>\n

But in 10 days\u2019 time they\u2019re moving to Nashville, where there\u2019s bright lights, noise and people, traffic and good food. \u201cJust to give it a shot for a while and get out of the woods for a minute,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s been all change on the band front as well. In fact, it\u2019s fortunate that there still is a band. In 2024 they came within a hair\u2019s breadth of calling it a day when drummer and founder member Robbie Staebler quit.<\/p>\n

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The plan was to honour the festival dates they had booked, and then for McLeod to concentrate on the engineering and production work he does from his home in St Augustine, Florida, when he\u2019s not on the road. Parks, meanwhile, would have carried on with his Jr Parks solo project. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t know, I\u2019d go bag groceries at Walmart or something. Learn a trade. Learn how to weld.\u201d<\/p>\n

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(Image credit: Travis Shinn)<\/p>\n

It was only when they brought in drummer Christian Powers for those few last dates that they found a renewed sense of purpose. \u201cAfter a couple shows, we realised that it didn\u2019t suck,\u201d says Parks.<\/p>\n

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The frontman shrugs off questions about the reason for Staebler\u2019s departure as \u201cboring. You know, every band has lost members, and it changes and it grows\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s definitely forced us as a band to get creative all over again,\u201d McLeod admits. \u201cI feel like we were kind of stuck in a rut for a little bit. But just having a breath of fresh air and a new drummer opened up new experimentations for us. So I guess that\u2019s the silver lining of losing a core member of a band \u2013 you almost get to start over.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fans will be queuing up to buy Powers a pint when they hear All Them Witches\u2019 excellent new album House Of Mirrors<\/a>, then, because they\u2019ve hit gold with it. It\u2019s fat-riffed, grungy stoner-doom power married to weighty psych experimentation, kicking off with a reinvention of an old traditional song, Red Rocking Chair, set ablaze with a breathtaking guitar riff. But what really sets the record apart is the blistering blues \u2013 not the mournful kind, the raging kind \u2013 at its foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up ear-deep in the blues,\u201d says Parks, a lifelong fan of Abner Jay, Skip James and Lead Belly. \u201cYou think about what black-metal guys go to jail for, and all the heinous shit they do, but Lead Belly went to jail twice for killing guys over cards, and was so charming and played guitar so well he got released from prison twice for just being a nice guy. But he\u2019d killed two people over a game of poker. That\u2019s as metal as fuck.\u201d<\/p>\n

All Them Witches – Red Rocking Chair [Official Visualizer] – YouTube
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McLeod, meanwhile, fell into a love affair with electric blues as a child when he discovered a Hendrix blues compilation.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m going back to more primitive stuff now,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I hear a white-boy blues band now where it\u2019s a squeaky clean mix, I just want to vomit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another new-album highlight, The Welterweight, with its intricate storytelling, reveals Parks\u2019s family history as a source of inspiration, warts and all.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy great-grandfather was a welterweight boxing champion in Alabama,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut he also was not a very good person. It\u2019s not a heroic story; he was kind of an asshole. That song is born out of expectations, first with people, second with your own intentions on how to move about with other people, with society.<\/p>\n

“A lot of people underestimate the people around them and how tough they are and how hard they can love and how generous they are, like you never really know. So that\u2019s what that song is about, the hidden capacities of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

All Them Witches – The Welterweight (Official Music Video) – YouTube
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All of this comes at a point when the band are enjoying a higher profile than ever. They signed a big management deal. They\u2019ve risen in popularity from underground alternative beginnings to audiences that are bigger with every tour.<\/p>\n

More impressively, they\u2019ve done it all by carving out their own niche. They\u2019ve toured as the first act on a bill with Primus<\/a> and Mastodon<\/a>, and played shows with The Sword, but mainly ploughed their own furrow, building their own fan base without piggybacking on others\u2019 success. Their only other support slot, on tour with Ghost, showed why that was the right move.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best way to describe it is ten thousand people just waiting for you to get off the stage,\u201d says Parks. \u201cAnd everybody in corpse paint looking at you, politely hating your music.\u201d<\/p>\n

That dry, droll sense of the absurd is a running theme with the two men. You get the impression that they\u2019re not starry-eyed about the industry. In fact they\u2019re extremely matter-of-fact and businesslike, describing the band as a \u2018company\u2019 more than once.<\/p>\n

All Them Witches – Full Performance (Live on KEXP) – YouTube
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Living in different states, they don\u2019t tend to hang out when they\u2019re not on tour, and they\u2019re very different people, too. Considering how they\u2019ve changed over the past decade, McLeod admits to having a hot head and a quick temper. \u201cI\u2019ve been trying to have a better attitude and a more positive mindset on the road,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Parks is the opposite. Previously he tended to live in his head and stay under the radar, but is now getting better at taking leadership and making decisions. \u201cMaybe we\u2019re just getting finer with time, aged like a fine wine,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

It certainly seems that way from a musical point of view. And as good as House Of Mirrors is, they\u2019re looking to improve, having weathered recent storms and reignited their creative spark.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to continue making interesting albums,\u201d says McLeod. \u201cI still don\u2019t think that we\u2019ve had the album yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, there\u2019s something in there that\u2019s trying to come out,\u201d Parks says in agreement. \u201cI think what it takes is spending a little more time around each other to release the beast. But there\u2019s something coming. Don\u2019t know what it is, but it\u2019s something back there.\u201d<\/p>\n

House of Mirrors is out now via BMG<\/p>\n

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All Them Witches: House Of Mirrors – Today’s Best Prices<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s six years since All Them Witches released their last album, Nothing As The Ideal. That\u2019s six years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-657246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}