In This Moment have never released an album without building somewhere for it to live.
Blood came drenched in red. Black Widow spun its own trap. Ritual brought the pulpit, Mother built an altar, and Godmode put divinity beneath the stage lights. Each era arrived with its own mythology, visual language, and freshly transformed version of Maria Brink standing at the center.
The next one is called WITCH.
In This Moment’s ninth studio album arrives August 28 through Better Noise Music, marking the band’s first full-length release with the label and its first since 2023’s Godmode. The announcement came alongside “Crawl,” an industrial-edged demand for the people at the top to begin considering the view from their knees.
This is not a band reaching for a spooky noun because Halloween merchandise photographs well.
The title is the thesis.
The witch was never waiting in the woods
Brink calls WITCH a “declaration of inner transformation” built around embracing duality and turning pain, persecution, and struggle into strength. Within the album’s mythology, the witch is not a villain, a warning, or a shadow lurking just beyond the village. She is a creator, connected to the universe and capable of shaping her own reality.
That idea fits naturally into the world In This Moment have spent years constructing. Their music has repeatedly circled feminine anger, sexuality, religion, trauma, judgment, and the extremely inconvenient moment when the person being controlled realizes the arrangement is optional.
On WITCH, Brink appears to be reclaiming the accusation itself.
The witch has historically been imagined as the woman who knows too much, wants too much, speaks too clearly, or exists beyond the approved boundaries of everyone around her. Calling her dangerous is easier than admitting she cannot be controlled.
In This Moment are not attempting to make that figure less threatening.
They are asking why anyone assumed the threat was the problem.
“Crawl” does not send a polite warning
“Crawl” introduces the album with electronic pressure, industrial textures, and a riff heavy enough to make the message difficult to misunderstand.
Brink describes the track as a reckoning for those who dominate, exploit, and cause pain. Chris Howorth widens the target beyond one personal enemy, connecting it to the systems and powerful entities that continue abusing people with less protection.
The song’s conclusion is not especially complicated: eventually, the people standing on everyone else run out of bodies beneath them.
Brink warns that “the fall is inevitable,” while Howorth frames the track around standing up and fighting back. Neither appears particularly interested in negotiating a gentler landing.
“Crawl” does not send a carefully worded cease-and-desist. It wants the powerful brought low enough to look directly at the people they once considered beneath them.
The official video returns Brink to the heightened visual world that has become inseparable from In This Moment, but the spectacle does not soften the song’s anger. It gives the anger somewhere larger to stand.
That has always been the band’s best use of theater. The costume is not there to disguise the wound. It tells you exactly how the wound would dress if it came back for revenge.
The guests are part of the spell
The official WITCH tracklist contains 11 songs and three collaborations that fit neatly inside the album’s larger argument.
Dayseeker appear on “I Want to Believe,” while Kim Dracula returns on “Heretic,” the first piece of the album released in July 2025. Kat Von D joins the band for a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall,” an especially pointed choice for a record concerned with authority, persecution, and the machinery used to keep people obedient.
“Heretic” had already established the album’s refusal to seek approval. The song rejects faith, punishment, vanity, and the expectation that someone must become another person’s pain or remedy. Kim Dracula’s presence makes the confrontation stranger and more volatile, which is exactly what that track requires.
The band followed it in May with “Sleeping With the Enemy,” which Brink described as an attempt to confront darkness rather than pretend it exists exclusively outside us. The song turns its attention toward darkness that may be external, internal, or already familiar enough to know where everything is kept.
Together, the singles suggest WITCH is not interested in one clean battle between victim and villain.
Sometimes the enemy is a system. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it has been living inside the house.
The remaining titles move through shame, belief, family, possession, darkness, and absence. The record closes with “Something I Can Never Have,” stretching the final reckoning to nearly seven minutes. The sequence suggests an album moving between public confrontation and considerably more private forms of damage.
This era was built to leave the headphones
Less than a month after WITCH arrives, In This Moment will take the new era on the revived Taste of Chaos tour with Hollywood Undead. I See Stars, Vana, and Melrose Avenue will join the run, which begins September 22 at The Fillmore in Charlotte before visiting The Ritz in Raleigh the following night. The full schedule is available through the band’s official tour page.
That timing matters because In This Moment albums are never fully explained by the recordings.
The stage is where Brink’s ideas become physical. Costumes, movement, lighting, props, and the band’s shifting visual identities are not decorations added after the songs are finished. They are another part of the language.
WITCH gives that language plenty to work with.
The obvious production would involve smoke, ritual imagery, trials, fire, and enough black fabric to create a localized weather event. The more interesting question is how Brink will represent the transformation itself.
In This Moment’s strongest productions do not simply make her look powerful. They show the cost of becoming powerful, then make the audience watch the final form walk out of the wreckage.
A record built around persecution, duality, and creation could become a trial, an execution, a resurrection, or all three before the first costume change.
The next transformation has already begun
After more than two decades, In This Moment’s greatest trick is not reinvention.
It is continuity disguised as transformation.
Brink is still drawn toward the collision between femininity, horror, sensuality, anger, and control. Howorth’s guitars still provide the physical force beneath the ceremony. The band still make heavy music for listeners who prefer their emotional breakthroughs to arrive with fire, distortion, and at least one deeply threatening veil.
What changes is the position from which the story is told.
On WITCH, Brink does not appear interested in asking what pain has done to her. She is deciding what the pain will be used to create.
The witch was never the villain.
She was the person everyone tried to burn, returning to ask whether they brought enough fire.
WITCH arrives August 28 through Better Noise Music. “Crawl,” “Sleeping With the Enemy,” and “Heretic” are available now.