It’s Bandcamp Friday once again — hope you all are having a happy one!

Feels like a good time to check in on our Michiganian friends Bog Wizard. Back when we published a review of their 2020 and 2021 releases, there were a few specific references to the “Satanic Panic” of the late 20th century. Well, since that time, the band went and released a whole damn album named for that concept. They also put together an album with literary tie-ins, both of which are highly recommended for you to check out!

 

Bog Wizard – Journey Through the Dying Lands (self-released in collaboration with Madness Hearts Games, 25 October 2024)

 

Bog Wizard – Satanik Panik (self-released, 31 October 2025)

 

2024’s Journey Through the Dying Lands started its life with the mammoth (practically twenty-minute) opening track “I, Mycelium” which is based on drummer Harlen Linke‘s short story of the same name (starring the Bog Wizard character). Admittedly, it was on the strength of this song — and specifically the ultra-catchy and repetitive slow groove that underpins large swaths of it, alternating with crunchy doom riffs — that pushed the album into my list of 2024’s best releases. One of those cases where upon first listen it absolutely grabs your brain through the ear-holes and refuses to let up the whole way through.

The band has offered up two other new tracks here (one in their familiar psychedelic-doom idiom, the other acoustic with haunting choral-style vocals), each relating to other stories in the Journey Through the Dying Lands anthology book that also features “I, Mycelium,” and rounding things out are live versions of two songs from 2021’s Miasmic Purple Smoke, “recorded in front of a live audience of nerds at their local game store, Epic Tabletop Hobbies out of Grand Haven, Michigan.”

 

 

On Halloween last year, the band dropped their latest, Satanik Panik, which quickly clawed its way onto my year-end-list for that year as well, on the basis of its excellent Epicus Doomicus Metallicus compositions. Like the rest of Bog Wizard‘s catalog, this is set against a backdrop of bugs and birds and other natural sounds that would be found in a swamp, and intermixed with influences of psychedelia and dark blues. Also like the rest of the band’s material, the subject matter tends towards the occult and fantastic: outside of the title track with its chants of “Satan, Satan!” the songs here are generally filled with references to golems and goblins, dragons and necromancers, and other such nerdily topics.

Speaking of nerdy stuff: the album concludes with a bass-heavy distorted-blues-rock cover of “Toxic Love,” the original version of which, as some late-80s and early-90s kids will recall, was sung by Tim Curry as his character Hexxus (the evil spirit of destruction) in the environmental and conservartion-themed film FernGully: The Last Rainforest. With its lyrical mentions of sludge and slime and muck, this fits perfectly with the rest of the album.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Find Journey on vinyl/CD here or digitally here; grab an autographed copy of the affiliated book here (also available in Kindle edition here).

Panik is on vinyl or CD here, or the digital version here.

Also be sure to check out the band’s Bigcartel store for some exclusive goodies you can’t get on Bandcamp, including this nifty wooden dice box!

 

 

 

* * * * * * *

 

Bog Wizard: Bandcamp | Bigcartel | Youtube
Madness Hearts Press: website | games