THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Bleak Magician’s new album No Fireball Show is something of a sonic scrapbook / slideshow. With 20 songs clocking in at 28 minutes, it explores childhood memories of the two siblings who lead the Baltimore band, and reflects on their life as brothers who have grown into the world of 2025.
“For a few years when we were kids, Weirding and I lived on a construction site,” says Srogi Mroczek, who founded the band with brother Weirding Batweilder. “We used to imagine that it was the site of a big carnival that came to town. As summer wore on, we developed crazier and crazier stories about what had happened to the carnival. Ultimately, we pretended that the bulldozers and earthmovers scattered around the site were carnival rides left behind after some great cataclysm had struck — like a comet hitting the Earth or nuclear war breaking out. We spent the entirety of the summer of 1984 riding skateboards and bmx bikes and building ramps with scraps of wood and metal that we found on the site. Those were days that seemed to last forever. This album is an homage to that time in our lives.”
Adds Weirding: “The last album had a lot of edge to it. Whereas this one sort of disintegrates in places — revealing something more like fragmented memories. We talked about this idea a lot during the recording sessions — what if you could capture what memory sounds like?”
Srogi and Weirding began worked together in 2019 — with Srogi as audio engineer and Weirding as songwriter — on albums by the avant-metal band Bornwithhair and the vampiric black metal project Vinterdracul. “I don’t remember how we ever decided to work together on projects,” says Srogi. “We just started doing it. And it’s not like this is something we always did. Despite being brothers, we spent the majority of our lives ignoring one another.”
Srogi and Dirt Boucher also play together in Mephistophilizer — something of a latter-day homage to the Neat Records catalog. The trio started working together as Bleak Musician in late 2023, after the long and unexplained sudden disappearance and reappearance of Batweilder. Their debut full-length How The Disappearance Appeared To Us was released digitally and on limited-edition cassette in December 2024.
“He vanished during the PR campaign of the second of what had been planned as three full-length Vinterdracul albums about movie-vampires,” says Srogi. “He turns up again over a year later — in fact, he turns up on what turns out to be the first day of tracking for the first Bleak Magician album.” Batweilder is characteristically circumspect in regard to any discussion of his disappearance or re-emergence. Rather he shifts the conversation to the new music: “This is Srogi’s thing,” he says. “There is enough to talk about with this here music without getting caught up in what’s bygone.”
Bleak Magician’s sound is informed by the brothers’ songwriting and recording techniques. “We map everything out on synthesizers,” says Weirding. “Then we go in with guitars and drums and start to destroy everything.” Despite (or on account of) that creative destruction, the end result is the closest the brothers have ever come to writing hits.
Adds Boucher: “It’s pretty kinda accessible, I guess. I mean, some of Weirding’s other stuff is like way out there — like 15-minute songs full of noise and these weird minimalist drum machines and these disembodied voices and out-of-tune things going on. With this new stuff, like, I don’t think there is a song longer than three minutes and there are like actual verses and choruses. I mean, it’s like rock music.”
