It’s been close to 15 years since Dax Riggs delivered a solo album, but the onetime Acid Bath sludgester is poised to make a comeback in 2025. Before the cult Louisiana songwriter officially forks over his forthcoming 7 Songs for Spiders full-length, though, he’s previewing the collection through a creepy-crawly alt-blues single called “deceiver.”
The upcoming record was cut at Riggs’ home studio in the “swamps of Southern Louisiana” alongside bandmates Lucas Broussard (guitar, synth), Kane Cormier (bass) and Scott Domingue (percussion). With “deceiver,” the band lock into an ultra-distortion-saturated, and highly hummable gloom-swing, above which Riggs surges out a powerfully raspy character portrait of someone who “ain’t no great deceiver” but “ain’t no bride of Jesus either.”
Riggs himself described the song as “[s]ome kind of country and western doom ballad concerning that little light inside each of us — a celebratory turning away from the darkness and hypocrisy of the established gods of old.” You can check out the Southern-styled sludge-pop piece up above,
The rest of Riggs’ album is said to be inspired by “world music, gospel and proto-metal sounds” and the Cajun landscape in which these songs were written, while its themes include “human beings collapsing in upon themselves, songs about sympathy for the villain, songs about God and what your gods tell you about yourself.”
7 Songs for Spiders is due out in full January 24th. The album follows Riggs’ 2010 solo full-length, Say Goodnight to the World.