A little over a week ago, word got out that Nine Inch Nails'
The Hand That Feeds would be part of the Fortnite Festival. Among the other groups featured in the festival is a new name:
Witchgang. A few days ago,
a lyric video for the song Nothing's Alright was released, and people were posting to reddit about
being confused about this band.
Fortnite Festival has its roots in the game Rock Band, and the team behind Rock Band, Harmonix, recently joined Epic, the company behind Fortnite. In the past, Harmonix has included lesser known bands in Rock Band, and folks were postulating that this might be the case here. There's scant information about Witchgang online -
a minimalist website links to several outlets where you can hear their music. (Personally, I'm still all about
bandcamp, since you can download lossless copies, stream freely, and musicians get more of a cut, but I digress). Their
Instagram account has comments cheering them on, mixed in with a couple people who are acting suspicious about the appearance of this band out of nowhere.
It was shaping up to be a fun mystery to unpack, but leave it to the corporate overlords to give the game away. Now, if you're reading the lyrics to
Nothing's Alright, lines like "the worldâs on fire but nothing can stop me now" are going to stick out to you. Even the name of the song hints at themes familiar to visitors of this site. So when
the song's page on Apple Music lists the production and writing credits, and you're seeing names like Dave Sitek, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Thomas Fec, Ross Birchard, among others - the picture gets even more interesting.
There are two tracks available now:
Nothing's Alright (which you can
perform on Fortnite), and
Timeless. I'd bet there's more to come.