By Jim Barber
For more than a decade, powerhouse Swiss metal band Burning Witches has blasted their way into the hearts and minds of fans of heavy music with a message. And that message is, ‘don’t mess with us,’ or as the kids say today ‘FAFO!’
The quintet of masterful musicians, dynamic performers and strong personalities has already released five albums into the world, each one building on the themes of resistance to persecution, speaking strength to power, and encouraging self-empowerment. From the beginning, band founder and primary songwriter Romana Kalkuhl set out to create a sisterhood in metal, a deliberately all-female band that was as blisteringly bold, ferociously focused and heavy and hard rockin’ as any band filled with dudes in the past, present or future.
And my has she succeeded. Burning Witches is set to release their sixth album, Inquisition, through Napalm Records. It is an album that sees Kalkuhl and bandmates Courtney Cox (lead guitars), vocalist/lyricist Laura Guldemond, drummer Lala Frischknecht and bassist Jeanine (Jay) Grob, unleashing a fiery assault on the historic nature of the way outsiders, particularly woman, have been treated through history. The Inquisition was a determined effort by the Catholic church to stamp out disobedience to their edicts, disloyalty to their command, and dissemination of any thought or idea that detracted from their entrenched worldview. In the guise of religious zeal and holiness, untold thousands of people were tortured, mutilated and killed because they looked different, thought different, acted different and had the temerity to question accepted teachings and doctrine.
As with the similarly structured and fanatically inculcated ‘witch hunts,’ women were often the primary targets, and all it took to get an ‘interview’ with an inquisitor or one of their depraved, holier-than-thou minions, was salacious gossip from a wronged neighbour. It is this notion of people ‘ratting out’ their neighbours for personal gain or simple spite that propelled Netherlands native Guldemond’s writing for this album, particularly the title track.
“The most infamous thing about the Inquisition was that no one was safe anymore, because everyone was pointing at each other like, ‘hey, you’re a heretic.’ But there are lots of people who don’t really know what the Inquisition is. It’s the time in history when the Catholic church had this organization running around to basically get rid of all the heathens and occultists and things like that. And people would really start to point fingers at each other accusing them of doing something wrong, because if they didn’t point at other people, they would come under suspicion themselves. Or if they were a suspect and they didn’t point out other people, they wouldn’t be forgiven even if they confessed. They would die. So, it’s basically all about fear and it would be a big mess with all these people going around pointing at each other,” she explained.
“We have a lot of songs on the album that are around that theme, where you can maybe feel shame because of something, or maybe fear that you would even lose your soul or something. So, it goes pretty heave at times, but on the other hand, if you see the video we did for the song ‘Inquisition,’ it’s more of a relatable thing than something from history because it’s kind of talking about an Inquisition in your own mind. So, in the clip, Jay is torturing me, everybody is torturing me but what it’s supposed to show is that it’s all in the head. It’s all in the mind, right. You have your own thoughts that are keeping you prisoner and torturing you. That was kind of the idea, that we can all have an Inquisition in our minds.”
As the lyricist and the person who, for the most part, comes up with the general theme of each album, Guldemond works closely with Kalkuhl to ensure the words sync up with the tone of the music being written.
“Romans starts the writing. She has a little place at home where she has all her guitars and a place to record. Some of the songs get written in the rehearsal room a little bit, but most of them start with Romana having some riff ideas at home and then she sends them to us on WhatsApp and then she goes with everyone who is living in Switzerland [including Grob and Frischknecht] goes to the rehearsal room and that’s how it gets started,” Guldemond, who still lives in Holland, explained.
“Romana sometimes has the theme, or we decide on one together. I sometimes have ideas too. The first album after I joined [Dance With the Devil in 2020] was without a theme. It was just a group of songs. But since then we did themes. And it’s nice because you write down a lot of ideas and then together you think of one of the things, the ideas, that really have to be in there, or two or three main ideas, because it all has to relate back to the theme. And then the rest just naturally comes together from there. It’s kind of a bit easier in a way to write when you have a theme because anything that doesn’t fit those main ideas, you can put aside until maybe another album.
“Once the theme is decided and I start getting the music from Romana and the others, I know I need to start writing. I personally really don’t like to start writing too much before I get the music because I know I will likely have to rewrite it anyway. Usually, I might have some possible titles and ideas before hand, but no real lyrics.”
‘High Priestess of the Night’ is another of the many standout tracks on Inquisition. It leans a little less on the theme of oppression, control and paranoia and more on the notion of holding strong to your uniqueness and ‘witchiness’ even in the face of the prevailing morality and cultural norms.
“It’s kind of the happy song on the album. And I think it’s kind of the part where some people actually don’t care about what others say and think and what they’re being to told do, and they just do what they want anyways. So, they will take risks and just do it. I though it was cool to imagine a witch soaring through the sky and feeling free, and then maybe connecting it to Lilith because she was portrayed as an evil person or a demon or whatever. So, I think it would be cool to just imagine something like that where it can be seen as a bad thing but also a good thing at the same time,” Guldemond said.
While the band is only a decade old, and the band members still quite young, they adhere to an old-school heavy metal approach that is more reminiscent of classic metal acts such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, than the more fractured and hyphenated metal sub-genres that have proliferated over the last 30 years. As stated above, band founder Kalkuhl desired all along to form a band that was comprised not just of a couple of women or a majority of women, but exclusively women.
“Romana started this band, an all-female band, because when she was in bands before, she was usually the only female band member. And the reason why she started an all-female band was because she wanted to see how it was with an all-female band – how the dynamic was different because she was always with guys. She wanted to have it for fun too. Back when we started, we didn’t know what would happen. We didn’t ever think we would tour around all over the place and play huge shows and festivals. We thought, yeah maybe six shows a year and have a bit of fun hanging out and rehearsing together. But that main reason was she wanted to see how it would work, and what kind of music and band would come with all females,” Grob said.
“In the beginning, yes, we had some struggles. It was not easy and it’s still a male-dominated scene. But I think it’s got easier and better over the last 10 years. The world seems to be more open to the idea [of all female metal bands]. But also, it still feels like when you’re a female you have to be stronger, you have to be better. When we started people didn’t think we were playing. People thought there was someone backstage playing. But why would we think of doing that? We are here because we want to play, to do music and have fun. People can see that we’re playing everything, and the people can see that we go to the merch table after our shows. We love to talk and party with people. We don’t sit around backstage the whole day waiting to go on. We’re all totally crazy. We want to go out, we want to meet people.”
“Most people are totally chill and okay with Burning Witches being an all-female band. There’s always a couple of rotten apples, but even if there is, we don’t care. I mean, if you look on the internet, you always have some people just writing stupid comments sometimes. But you can’t take those people seriously to begin with. And at the gigs, it’s usually all really nice people. Maybe once in a while there’s an asshole who says something like, ‘it must be because they’re a woman,’” added Guldemond.
Kalkuhl started Burning Witches with both Grob and Frischknecht beside her alongside vocalist Seraina Telli (now a solo artist of note) with guitarist Alea Wyss joining a year later in 2016. This was the lineup that wrote, recorded and released the band’s self-titled debut album in 2017. Lauded for the power of the original compositions, as well as a badass cover of Judas Priest’s ‘Jawbreaker,’ the record earned Burning Witches a record deal with Nuclear Blast, who released their next three albums, Hexenhammer (2018), Dance With the Devil (2020) and The Witch of the North (2021). Dark Tower, released in 2023 was issued through the group’s new label Napalm Records.
Telli left in 2019 and was replaced by Guldemond, while the band cycled through two more lead guitarists, Sonia ‘Anubis’ Nusselder (now with Cobra Spell) and Larissa Ernst, before American-born Cox, a former member of The Iron Maidens (an all-female Iron Maiden tribute band) joined in 2023.
The band’s renown has expanded beyond their European borders, where Burning Witches is already an in-demand live act, particularly on the festival circuit. A long-anticipated U.S. tour was planned for late August into September but was postponed due to visa delays from the U.S. government. Some shows have already been rescheduled for the following dates:
March
14 – Pompano Beach, FL – Piper’s Pub
15 – Clearwater, FL – OCC Road House
20 – Westland, MI – Token Lounge
22 – Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
24 – Pittsburgh, PA – Crafthouse Stage and Grill
27 – Teaneck, NJ – The Debonair Music Hall
28 – New Bedford, MA – The Vault Performing Arts Center
29 – Hampton Beach, NH – Wally’s
April
1 – Annapolis, MD – Ram’s Head On Stage
2 – Virginia Beach, VA – Elevation 27
4 – Sanford, FL – West End Trading Co
Before then, they’re going to start 2026 back across the Atlantic for a massive tour of northern Europe and The U.K. staring in Milan, Italy on January 9.
“We appreciate everything we’ve got and every place we get to play. Of course, it’s a dream when you get to play Wacken [Open Air Festival, arguably the largest and most prestigious metal festival in the world] or get to tour over in the U.S. and all over Europe. That’s amazing. We want to keep doing that. Our biggest hope is that we can move forward with all the same band members for the next 10 or even 20 years. That would be great, and that we will all still have fun with one another and have these nice experiences together while travelling, doing music videos and making music,” said Grob.
“We’ve played South America twice and we would always like to go back. It would be great if we could play in Japan and China. It would be nice to go places and have time to really see what’s there. It’s hard when you’re touring to get out to see those places. We do it whenever we have time. Last time we were in Australia we had so much travelling to do, but we did get to see the Sydney Opera House, but I personally would have loved to have gone to this nature reserve where you can see kangaroos and actually hold the koalas. We have a team that is working nearly 24 hours a day working on getting us dates and stuff, including in Canada. We want to play there. We know we have fans there,” added Guldemond.
For more information on Inquisition and future tour dates for Burning Witches, visit https://www.burningwitches.ch.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
