Named after a Danish fairy tale, Esben and the Witch craft haunting music that blends the delicate beauty of folk and shoegaze with the primal heaviness of metal. While the trio's 2011 debut album, Violet Cries, felt indebted to goth and post-rock, the band soon expanded their horizons and cranked up their amps, adding heft to 2014's Steve Albini-engineered A New Nature. While they concentrated on the heavier aspects of their music, Esben and the Witch expressed them with plenty of nuance: They balanced crushing riffs with Rachel Davies' lucid vocals on 2016's ambitious suite Older Terrors, added a jolt of punk rebellion on 2018's Nowhere, and balanced contemplation with catharsis on 2023's stripped-down Hold Sacred.