Review & Full Album Premiere: Bog Wizard, Satanik Panik
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on October 29th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Michigan’s Bog Wizard release their fourth album, Satanik Panik, this Friday, on Halloween. One could hardly find a better time to put out a record that calls to mind grainy 1980s footage and its somehow-even-dumber modern corporatized equivalent news clips of America being under threat by ‘The Devil,’ which by the way is a thing that more than half the country still believes in. Red guy. Pitchfork. Will make you burn in hell forever because you jerked off or some shit. Yeah, that’s the guy. You may have seen him 25 years ago or again recently on South Park. As unfathomable as it seems, humans still walk around on the lookout for him. Gonna be searching a while.
And while it’s true that the devil behind most of humanity’s woes turned out to be capitalism, that doesn’t mean Bog Wizard can’t give a well-deserved sendup to the whole notion on Satanik Panik which opens with a Tolkien reference (lest we forget Tolkien was derided as satanic while also writing christian allegory; it goes like that when you deal with idiots) in “The Dead Marshes,” which keeps its introductory insect ambience even as the creeper riff is brought in. It’s not until the verse that the bugs recede, and the dirt-tone of Ben Lombard‘s guitar and Colby Lowman‘s bass are suitably rumbling to clear the air.
Vocals are dramatic but clean at the outset — the title-track soon offers a gruffer take, though I don’t know whether it’s Lowman or drummer Harlen Linke in either — and the march is slow on the album’s opener/longest track (immediate points), but even here, the expectation of fun overrides and Bog Wizard make doomed sounds a good time. “Dragon’s Hoard” leans even further into grim-mood heavy and fosters an atmosphere that makes me wonder why dungeon doom isn’t a thing. Because it could be. Or it probably is and I’m just out of the loop. Roll the dice, create a genre. A hell of a day for the campaign, in any case.
Stoner, doom, sludge, and lore? What’s not to like? “Satanik Panik,” the title-track, is a satire/celebration of heavy metal’s antichristian reputation, with backwards messaging and a chorus chanting the incantation “satan” after a chugging verse topped with gruff but punkish throaty vocals like something out of earliest White Zombie. This is not the preening, trying-to-make-the-listener-think-the-band-actually-believes-this-shit positioning of black metal (which inadvertently reinforces christian dogma; thanks for coming to my Ted Talk), but something entirely more stoned and shenanigans-based. A collective tongue in a collective cheek. More Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick and memes than trying to raise an army for the boogieman.
They engage their own prior storytelling in “RIASGLAFM (Swamp Golem Returns),” which along with the title-track makes me wish downloads came with lyric sheets, answering back to “Swamp Golem,” which closed 2020’s From the Mire — Satanik Panik, on the other hand, caps with “Toxic Love,” originally sung by Tim Curry from the 1992 movie Ferngully — and hit a peak as regards sheer heft, with sludgy growls over a lumbering procession. The midsection hook has a thick boogie and cleaner vocals echoing chants (they cycle through twice), and as “Necromancer” follows the centerpiece, Linke‘s synth makes its presence felt in a prominent position, furthering the horror-cinema vibe.
“Necromancer” is also nastier than “RIASGLAFM (Swamp Golem Returns),” vocally and instrumentally. The synth pulls away from some of the heft that the song before wrought, but a screamier take pervades following the gradual build of the intro — which, by the way, encompasses the entire first half of the song — such that Bog Wizard harness a bit of early black metal char, the recorded-in-a-basement feel becoming part of the overarching aesthetic statement.
It is as deep as they go in terms of extremity, but the two-minute “Mind Goblin” switches up the arrangement to bring in resonant, hang-drum-style hand percussion and what I’m pretty sure is credited as “air organ” below, creating a meditative psychedelia that, well, if they wanted to explore that for another 20 minutes or so, I’d be there for it, despite the apparent departure from Satanik Panik‘s theme. Bog Wizard aren’t strangers to soundtracking; “Mind Goblin” is a brief glimpse of this impulse at its best. And naturally, they turn it over in stark style to the metal’ed up “Toxic Love,” which is also under three minutes long and rounds out with the kind of reference that, if you’re a nerd of a certain age, will surely bring a smile to your face. Not taking anything away from a remarkable talent like Tim Curry, the band do not fail to make “Toxic Love” their own.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say that all beliefs are valid and if you think satan walks the earth to tempt mankind into perdition, that’s cool. Actually it’s not. It’s broadly destructive and the interests it serves are not those of humanity or some imagined afterlife. Grow up. I was raised catholic. My entire life I’ve heard the voices of religion beating back and vestiges of human progress, and looking around in 2025, if there was ever a great battle for the soul of this nation, the bad guys have won, in god’s name. I do not respect those beliefs and I won’t ‘tolerate’ bullshit anymore from the intolerant. If Satanik Panik is taking the assholes down a peg by pointing out the utter ridiculousness of dogma as acted-upon philosophy, so much the better. The right side of history needs voicing too.
The album streams in its entirety on the player below. Please enjoy:
Backwards playing records, ancient tombs and candles, funny dice and evil spells, your household is in shambles…
October 31st, 2025, SATANIK PANIK is coming through the darkness to bring our evil forces into your house.
Satanik Panik is our 4th full length album, with six new tracks and one cover song. The album opens with The Dead Marshes, which will be available as a single August 29th!
Satanik Panik will be available on CD and vinyl, more details on all of this to come, with preorders starting soon!
Artwork by the talented Benjamin Blåholtz, who also did the cover art for our split with Froglord.
Recorded at The Staggering Paladin
Mixed by Harlen Linke
Mastered by Esben Willems at Studio Berserk
Album art/ layout by Benjamin Blåholtz
Bog Wizard:
Ben Lombard – Vocals, Guitar
Harlen Linke – Percussion, Vocals, Handpan, Synth
Colby Lowman – Bass, Air Organ
