The first thing I noticed about Something Wicked wasn’t the riffs. It was the voice.
A lot of bands working somewhere between occult rock, doom and heavy rock end up treating vocals like another layer of atmosphere. Mandy Manala go in the opposite direction. Christa Nedergård sits right in the middle of everything, and after a few songs I realised I was paying as much attention to her phrasing as I was to the guitars.
Not because she’s trying to overpower the band. More because she sounds completely comfortable leading it.
The album itself feels darker than I expected. Going in, I was prepared for something rooted mostly in retro heavy rock, but there are stretches here that lean much further into shadowy, almost gothic territory. Not enough to turn the band into a gothic rock act, but enough to give the songs a different character than the usual occult-rock playbook.
Bloodred Chapel of Sin was one of the first tracks that really grabbed me. Not for any single riff or chorus. More because of the mood it creates. The whole thing feels slightly uneasy, like it’s building toward something unpleasant without ever fully exploding.
Nocturnal Bites hits with a completely different energy. That’s probably what I ended up liking most about the record. Even when the band stays within a familiar style, the songs don’t all serve the same purpose.
Psalm 77:7 kept growing on me too. It wasn’t an immediate favourite. If anything, it took a couple of listens before it properly clicked. Then one day I caught myself humming part of it without realising where it had come from.
That happens less often than it used to.
The heavier moments land because the band don’t spend every minute trying to prove how heavy they are. There are enough quieter passages and melodic turns scattered throughout the album that the bigger riffs actually feel bigger when they arrive.
I wasn’t familiar with Mandy Manala before hearing this record (the review of the previous album was written by my colleague), so I can’t really compare it to the debut beyond what other people have said. What I can say is that Something Wicked never felt like a band searching for an identity. It sounds like a group that already knows what it wants to be.
There are influences in there, obviously. Ghost came to mind once or twice. Lucifer too. Maybe even a little Chelsea Wolfe around the edges. But I never found myself thinking much about those comparisons while the album was playing.
Mostly I just wanted to hear where the next song would go.
That’s usually enough for me.
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Released by Argonauta Records on May 29, 2026
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
