Witch Post Cast Their Spell
Maisie Kirn
I first saw the singer-songwriter Alaska Reid perform on her parents’ sofa in Montana. I was one of something like 10 attendees, the rest of whom were neighbors and beaming relatives, seated on the floor as dogs and toddler-aged siblings weaved through the audience. Alaska and I were both in junior high at the time, pulling our spaghetti strap tank tops nearly down to our thighs and entertaining ourselves mostly by making fairy houses out of sticks and pinecones. Our fathers, both writers, had introduced the two of us in those years of childhood before one chooses their friends but they instead are chosen for you at kids’ tables and in convenient carpool configurations.
I remember the first song Alaska played on that couch clear as day even now, over a decade later - called ‘Old Ford Blue.’ She had written it about an old F-350 my father had once used for runs to the dump and chores around our small ranch but had since been permanently relegated to the driveway. Alaska and I spent countless winter hours digging between the truck seats, mining gold in the form of gas station figurines, stale nicotine gum, and receipts. We talked about boys. We pretended to steer towards the Crazy Mountains in the distance. We carved our names into the passenger seat with a ballpoint pen. Her voice and lyrics then were no different than they are now - chrysalis delicate yet somehow a punch to the gut. Gazing at Alaska from my seat on the floor, I listened, entranced, as she brought our old blue truck to life, making me sentimental for a time that had not yet passed us by. I didn’t know then that Alaska and I’s days in the old blue truck possessed any magic, but, somehow, she did. That preternatural ability of hers to conjure magic from the unremarkable before the rest of us even blink shines through all of her work to this day.
I have not had the gift of knowing Dylan Fraser as long as I have Alaska, but no matter - he introduced himself to me through his song ‘It Took A Lot To Get To This’ when it came across my Spotify on a long solo drive in 2022. Though we’ve never met, Dylan and I have been friends since. ‘Driving through our hometown // It’s been weeks away from here // Don’t know how to think ‘bout anything at all // I’m wired to the speaker, she’s telling me no // Don’t you worry it’s a false alarm’, he sings, somehow building, in just five lines, a world the listener inhabits and knows. I remember feeling like the song played from inside my head, like it existed already inside of my memory, but Dylan clicked ‘play’.
Though ‘It Took A Lot’ remains my most listened to of his songs, this is the effect of all of Dylan’s music: through genre-bending production, his effortlessly evocative voice, and cryptic-yet-spot-on lyrics, he builds a ubiquitous emotional landscape that leaves room for the listener to make it their own.
As I prepare to write this piece, Dylan introduces himself to me, more directly this time, through a recorded voice note, slowly revealing the source of his musical power. “I didn’t have many friends,” he tells me, and spent his early school days largely isolated in his childhood bedroom in a small town in Scotland, accompanied only by a guitar, four chords his mother taught him to play, and the internet, “I grew up online,” he says. Dylan’s description of his journey into music reminds me of a religious quest - that ultimate isolation and quiet that reveals great emotional clarity. We all recreate this for ourselves on long walks alone in the forest or time spent staring at the ceiling, but Dylan has trained this muscle and flexes it on every one of his songs. His isolation, I learn, not only informs his music but also enabled it; sometime around 15 or 16, he tells me, the meme pages he ran from his bedroom began to generate cash, money that he used to fund trips to London to record his first songs.
It was on one of those train rides to London that Dylan first heard Alaska Reid’s song Mermaid Tears. The song is about a locally famous establishment in Great Falls, Montana, where young women clad in mermaid costumes swim behind the bar. He reached out to Alaska on Instagram immediately and learned she, too, was on her way to London.
In July of 2022, the duo released their first collaboration – Vampire – a powerfully fun and lustful pop song that sounds like something you might hear playing at the most happening dance club in Hell. Now, Dylan and Alaska are embarking on another collaboration: Witch Post. The name, I’m told, refers to carvings made in fireplaces in parts of the U.K. to ward off witches. The supernatural power of their chosen name rings through the band’s first two songs, ‘Chill Out’ and ‘Ragged’. On the rock-adjacent former, Dylan and Alaska pass the mic back and forth, their vocals stronger and more commanding than ever before. It’s a full-on, let-your-hair down, shout-with-everything-you’ve-got good time.
In the latter, the slightly slower ‘Ragged’, Alaska introduces us with her feather-light voice to a new, mystical plane, ‘Little deer I left you here // Your clothes, your life like shadows on the show’. The ghostly, dream-like lines, dotted with imagery of the American West, are Alaska’s signature, but soon, Dylan enters the picture, his voice as pleading and heart-wrenching as ever. The song pulls at you, demanding you engage, maybe even shed a desperate tear, call an ex, or look through torn photos of your childhood. Only the best songs leave you no choice in your emotional response, and on ‘Ragged’, Dylan and Alaska cast their first spell.
“It’s scrappy, it’s DIY,” the two tell me of their new project. The descriptors are appropriate in the best way. Admittedly, they are an unexpected pair: a boy from Scotland who spent his childhood entrenched in internet culture, writing in his bedroom, and a girl who cut her teeth singing the National Anthem at the annual rodeo. But, somehow, Witch Post’s new music is not contrived: it is seamless, and deeply organic, it is what results when two friends with real appreciation for one another and genuine ease in each other’s presence get together and have a great hang. Listening, it’s difficult not to feel like you are a part of it: aren’t you lounging around on the couch with Dylan and Alaska? Aren’t you lazily strumming at your guitar as they laugh and tease out a melody?
The band recently played their first show, opening for A. G. Cook at The Viper Room in Los Angeles, and their sheer enjoyment at sharing the stage was infectious. “Now, music is a lot of intense pressure to keep up with trends and socials,” Dylan tells me, “We just want [Witch Post] to be fun.” Mission accomplished. No superimposed trends here, no made-for-TikTok sound bites, just the magic that happens when two immense talents come together and make up something even greater.
