The Breedling releases new album "A Straunge And Terrible Wunder"

The Breedling has released a new album, A Straunge And Terrible Wunder, via Wrong Speed Records, built by Chris Spalton around the 449-year-old English legend of Black Shuck, the East Anglian hellhound whose most notable recorded sighting fell on August 4, 1577.

The Quietus's review calls the record "designed to disturb," built from a "jet-black palette of drones, synths and field recordings" that drags the old folklore into the present. Across its tracks, from opener "Dread Herald" through "Scorched and Shrivelled," "Stalker" and penultimate track "Leaden Fury," industrial creaks, groans and glitches conjure what the review describes as a nightmarish vision of England's eastern coastline.

The review praised the record's intensity while flagging its main weakness: an unwillingness to let the tension ease. "The most memorable pieces of horror earn their truly spine-chilling moments through slow, pragmatic buildups," the reviewer wrote, adding that piling dread on top of dread from the first minute dulls its potency rather than sharpening it, and comparing the album's lack of subtlety to Witchfinder General rather than The Wicker Man.

Closing track "Fen Remnant" drew the highest praise as the album's most evocative moment, its slow-building dissonant melody going beyond a simple horror jump-scare to suggest something still breathing beneath the surface; the last sound on the record, after 41 minutes, is gentle birdsong.

A Straunge And Terrible Wunder follows Spalton's earlier album as The Breedling, Irukandji, his debut stab at industrial sound art, and continues a run of records exploring English folk horror through metal-adjacent rock textures rather than words or images.