Mortality is the oldest muse in the songwriter’s playbook. For the California-based musician Beau James Wilding, the clock of human existence didn’t just inspire a batch of new songs; it necessitated an entire creative rebirth. Shedding the standard acoustic trappings of his previous solo work, Wilding has reemerged under the ominous moniker Food for the Wyrm. The project’s debut album, A Wicked Huntsman, is an eight-track meditation on the finality of death and the trauma of the living. “We will all become food for the wyrm,” Wilding notes in the press materials, invoking the ancient imagery of the grave. “She waits in silent darkness to devour us all.” It is a grim mission statement, but one that results in a surprisingly vital, fiercely driven rock record.
A Wicked Huntsman effectively connects the geographical and cosmic divide between the California coast and the ancient Irish countryside. Wilding travelled to rural Northern Ireland in the summer of 2024 to record the album’s foundation at Analogue Catalogue Studios, a facility renowned for operating exclusively with two-inch vintage tape. Working alongside instrumentalists “Irish” Tom on the bodhrán and shruti box, and Frank Martian on electric guitar and synthesizers, the band captured a gritty, unpolished energy. The raw sessions were later brought back to the US, where they were honed, overdubbed, and mixed at Castaway 7 Studios in Ventura. The resulting fusion is a massive, heavy folk record propelled forward by the aggressive thrust of 1970s punk and the sludgy, doom-laden drones of classic metal.
Conceptually, the record operates with a rigid, literary structure. A Wicked Huntsman comprises three original compositions, three reimagined traditional songs, and two modified folk covers. The six core tracks are visually anchored by the album’s striking artwork, painted by the Norwegian artist Zein Hestnaes. Hestnaes illustrates six flowers native to the Irish countryside, with each bloom representing a specific human trauma: betrayal, loss, shame, cruelty, addiction, and ignorance. The goal of the record, according to Wilding, is to force this darkness into the light, churning through psychic dread to find some semblance of clarity on the other side.
The album opens with “Nigrido”, a scene-setting instrumental piece that immediately opens like a cinematic score for a Viking saga. It swells with eerie synthesizers and interestingly enchanting, ancient melodies. This chthonic atmosphere bleeds directly into “The Lowlands of Holland”, a reimagining of a mid-18th-century Scottish ballad. Here, a rumbling, sharp synthesizer drives the rhythm. Meanwhile, Wilding’s vocals arrive rocky, thick, and almost mean, a fiercely aggravated delivery that drags the traditional folk song kicking and screaming into the modern era.
The mood shifts into a more friendly, natural gear on “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”. Operating as a gritty country-rock travel song, it is saturated with literal roars and cries, allowing listeners to feel the weight of the message. The band then pivots to the traditional lexicon with “Unfortunate Rake”. Built around a deceptively soft rock guitar arrangement, Wilding and company roar in bitter reminiscence: “When I was a young man I used to seek pleasure / When I was a young man I used to drink ale.”
Moving into the latter half, the frenetic energy is deliberately toned down on the acoustic-driven “Lovers and Friends” and the creeping “The Blacksmith”, both of which offer a moment of brooding, psychedelic respite. “The Bells of Sleep” operates as a soothing, hypnotic interlude, cracking open with a spoken-word message filtered through a static, radio-effect voice. The record finally exhales on the closing track, “Rubedo”. It begins in a purely atmospheric phase, scouring in and out of the mix like a heavy fog rolling back out to sea.
A Wicked Huntsman is not a passive listening experience. Food for the Wyrm demands that the listener confront the darkest, most uncomfortable corners of the human psyche. By cross-pollinating the earnest storytelling of traditional folk with the abrasive noise of modern metal and punk, Wilding has created a singular record that turns fear into immediate, kinetic growth. Death is certain, the album argues, so there is absolutely no time left to play it safe.
This documentary offers a closer look at Analogue Catalogue Studios in rural Ireland, providing insight into the vintage tape-recording environment that shaped the gritty foundation of A Wicked Huntsman.