Crypt of the Wizard have ploughed an idiosyncratic furrow through the strangest corners of deeply underground sonics of cleaving ferocity and beyond since 2015. The shop has become an idiosyncratic institution through sheer dogged belief in the power and glory of heavy metal. Setting up on Hackney Road – and expanding to found a label in 2018 and a festival starting in 2024 – CotW remains the only specialist metal emporium in London. Initially the brainchild of founders Charlie Woolley and Marcus Mustafa (with the shop and label now run by Woolley alone) initial inspiration came from ultra-underground Swedish metal festival Muskelrock, where the pair met and immediately began to plot an outlet for a sorely underfed London scene.
“The last metal shop in London was Shades and that closed in the early 90s”, explains Woolley. “So we kinda got to write the blueprint for what a metal shop looked like in the UK in 2015. We said, ‘Fuck it; we’ll get a room, then we’ll paint it black, then we’ll put some records up.'”
The initial shop – aka ‘Crypt One’ – quickly garnered attention, offering vinyl and tapes that simply could not be found anywhere else in the city, alongside a sizeable second hand selection and a cast iron goat hoof door handle. The buzz was instant: there were queues outside the shop on the first day – despite the fact that they hadn’t even finished pricing up the records. Crypt quickly became an established part of the underground scene. However, Woolley describes a steep learning curve before Marcus left in 2020.
“Marcus was being pulled in different directions”, he says. “We weren’t getting enough new stuff in. Also, I’d started really believing that we could run the place with no Motörhead records; no Iron Maiden records – only underground stuff, new releases. It was a bit of a gamble. We sold a million fucking t-shirts and it was doing alright; just holding it together. Marcus wasn’t so sure though, and he decided to knock it on the head.”
Initially thinking that the shop might go out with a massive party but Woolley then decided – with encouragement from Marcus – to go it alone. But the shop was only part of the story. The label started in 2018 and – over the past seven years – Crypt of the Wizard have released everything from balls to the wall Motörheadesque street metal (Heavy Sentence – Bang To Rights), to melodic synth-driven, AOR-influenced pumpers (Gloomy Reflections – Oath Of The Paladins) via industrial-adjacent scuzz (Primitive Knot).
What then, does he look, for from an A&R perspective? “It just has to catch me. A good example is the Riders Of Rohan record. I saw a photograph of them in their capes. I did know one of them through the punk scene in Sweden, but the demo was just fucking crazy. It sounded like the B52s doing Kiss. I just know it when I get excited. I don’t want to keep releasing the same record over and over again. I don’t like orthodox metal, I get bored quickly and I’m not trying to run a cult label in the black metal sense – with a super narrow focus – so the label is a reflection of my taste.”
What follows is a guide to the singular ouvre of Crypt of the Wizard.
Ghold – ‘Nothing Dreamt’ from Stoic (2017)
Recorded in Leeds Unitarian Chapel, Stoic is a titanic combination of sludgy riffage, mauve atmospherics and deep doomy intensity from underground power trio Ghold. Building on the power of Pyr from 2016, Stoic amped the low end to a mighty concave rumble, building a deeply hypnotic baseline atop which sat a tundra of intense jagged noise.
Charlie Woolley: “They’re funny lads. It was just Alex (Wilson, bassist and vocalist) and Paul (Antony, drums) when I met them. I remember watching them in a pub and Paul’s drum kit was just moving; he’d hit the drums and drag them back toward him and it was like watching someone operating some kind of infernal machine. They were quite rough living, and did most rehearsals in their little flat. The drums were set up in the shower, the bass was set up in the living room. The early 00s underground had a big impact on me – Leviathan, Twilight, Eater Of Birds, Sunn O))), Southern Lord – and got me reinvested in underground metal but I was slightly oblivious to the noise rock scene. Ghold were somewhere between the two worlds. We did some tours which were fucking nightmarish. That band had a serious capacity for chaos – I saw them make a soundman cry and make a driver quit driving bands. They just had a certain ‘energy’ to them [laughs]. They liked pushing things really far. But we had a lot of fun.”
Primitive Knot – ‘Discipline And Punish’ from Puritan (2019)
A (then) one man industrial metal noise hybrid machine out of deepest darkest Manchester, Primitive Knot has released a plethora of gritty, emotive and idiosyncratic gear over the past decade. Referencing chilly post punk and cold wave textures, Puritan is a dense and grimy trip; as melodically astute as it is punishingly abrasive.
CW: “He’d done a tape on Aurora Borealis, which was one of the most important labels in underground music and at least ten years ahead of their time. I knew the guys who ran it from drinking in Garlic and Shots when I was about 14. It’s a proper old school thing that bar. All the old Soho weirdos and Hells Angels drank there. But people weren’t quite ready for what the label was doing. Anyhow, one of the last releases they did was by Primitive Knot. I put them on at a gig with Ghold and afterwards I asked if they wanted to record something. Puritan was totally different from what I’d heard before. For me it had a tone of black metal as well as industrial. I see these years as the proto formation of the label – important stepping stones.”
Natur – ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ from Afternoon Nightmare (2020)
Fusing thrash metal stylings with NWOBHM influences, Afternoon Nightmare saw Natur offering a selection flavoured by Brooklyn grot, underlaid with a resolutely eighties vibe. Tracks like ‘Mary Cross’ and ‘Poison King’ were satisfyingly crunchy – true metal scuzz. This album was a turning point for Crypt of the Wizard, after the first pressing sold out quickly.
CW: “Natur had already done a record on Earache. It was a time when those types of labels were still signing young metal bands without quite knowing what they were going to do with them. People were calling this music ‘vest metal’ at the time [laughs]. You wear a battle vests and pump your fists and all that. Anyway, Earache didn’t want to put out a second record because those labels weren’t well positioned to work with young bands to do runs of, say, 200 records: it just wouldn’t work for them. Natur were a very cool band to work with. They had no reason to put their trust in me at all. But they did and we sold out all the copies we printed. It was mind blowing to put out a record that people actually wanted; what a revelation! They were really into the skate scene and they were all very cool guys.”
Heavy Sentence – ‘Cold Reins’ from Bang To Rights (2021)
Worshipping at the eternal temple of Motörhead and imbued with street punk attitude alongside surprisingly deft melodic flourishes, Heavy Sentence were the absolute real deal. Bang To Rights was, on one level, sheer Special Brew and speed; a rasping, roaring – and quite extraordinarily British – take on base-level heavy metal. But those twin guitars and melodic hooks have an early 80s Lizzyesqueness in their sophistication and pomp. Thirty minutes of rip roaring genius. A true cult classic.
CW: “I saw them live and thought, ‘Fuuuck! This is what we need to be doing as a label. We need to be finding UK bands that are doing really fucking great stuff and promoting the living hell out of it.’ It felt like there was something of a scene. I was wrong though; Heavy Sentence were in a field of their own . They were just completely fucking unique. There were other bands lining up what looked like the same kind of thing – motorpunky heavy metal dudes who all looked good and had that dangerous radius of energy – but too many of them were trying to sound like Euro Metal. Heavy Sentence were more of a punk band, with a punk drummer. It was a bumpy road getting this album out but it was a total fucking smash. We sold out and repressed. That was a massive milestone for the label, to actually get to repress a record.”
Riders Of Rohan – ‘Fog On The Barrow-Downs’ from Riders Of Rohan (2022)
One of the most eccentric bands of recent years, Denmark’s Riders Of Rohan are exclusively lyrically inspired by the “verk of JRR Tolkien”. Fusing a beguiling mixture of raw energy with big Blue Oyster Cult / Fleetwood Mac-adjacent melody, they wear capes on stage, play with a galloping punky velocity tempered by eldritch atmosphere and display a gloriously geeky conceptual bent.
CW: “Fundamentally this is punk. Everyone always tells me I’m putting out punk records but I just tell them, ‘You don’t understand heavy metal.’ [laughs] The thing is, metal has become so over produced that if you want raw stuff you have to go to black metal. But a lot of bands I love have flourishes of metal but still sound punk. Riders Of Rohan are a really good example. There’s a lot of melody but they’re very rough. Like many bands before them, they’re inspired by Lord Of The Rings but they find an interesting way to transliterate the stories from the books. The first album is based on more well known stories; on the EP we get into the deeper stuff. On their recent UK tour we travelled across the UK and did a bit of Tolkien tourism. They made the elf bread! We stood and ate it near the standing stones at Avebury. We had a delightful tour. I’m very excited about them: a phenomenal band.”
Parish – ‘Parish’ from Parish (2022)
Phenomenal world-building power trio, Parish take inspiration from the idea of a 16th century English, well… parish. Telling tales of hardship, murder, skullduggery, apothecary and superstition, they released first EP God’s Right Hand on Crypt Of The Wizard in 2020 but solidified their sound on this masterful self-titled debut LP. Fully realised and self contained, Parish immediately stood outside the plethora of seventies influenced doomy gear kicking about at the time due to their command of both stonking great riffage and a world so perfectly realised it could be cast in aspic.
CW: “It’s the world building thing but it taps into something that particularly animates me – bands who arrive fully-formed from the get go. I played it to my wife and she said that it sounded as if we should already know it. So, bold as brass, I said, ‘Come in and we’ll do four tracks.’ I knew that I had to take a risk with these guys. Luckily I was moving my space above Holy Mountain recording studio and was cut an incredible deal. We’re trying to cultivate a bit of an engine now where we cultivate bands and record them down there and then release them up here. Parish were the first where we did everything ourselves. I had a great experience doing the EP but we booked a full week for the album. They’d written these incredible fucking songs. They paint this vision of an England that is dark and terrifying and conceptually fully formed. There are bands meddling in the same thing and sometimes they have the look or the name but everything else is wrong. Also: they’re a classic power trio – they’ve always said that if somebody wants to stop then the whole band will stop.”
Gloomy Reflections – ‘In The Age Of Night’ from Oath Of The Paladins (2024)
A glorious and bizarre amalgamation of fist pumping, 1980s AOR tinged melodic flourish, brittle cold wave synth pop, galloping Maidenesque riffs and dungeon synth lo-fi production values. Gloomy Reflections’ masterful Oath Of The Paladins has bewitched pretty much everyone who has heard it.
CW: “I couldn’t believe it when Gloomy sent me their record because it was so good. With the Riders record, with Parish, with Gloomy – I must have listened to those records 2,000 times each before they even got out into the world. There was a sense of, ‘I don’t know who this is for but I’m going to press 200 copies of it.’ It’s such a joy to see the response and reaction. Obviously these guys have been in so many great projects already, so how they keep on striking gold is amazing to see.”
Steröid – ‘The Main Stage’ from Chainmail Commandos (2025)
Steröid are a bonkers egg punk / stadium rock-influenced side project of Gloomy guitarist and vocalist Gordo Blackers. This debut LP Chainmail Commandos is just as exciting and idiosyncratic as Night Of The Paladins, and represents one of the label’s more surprising success stories.
CW: “I was aware that Gordo had made dungeon synth music as Quest Master and I’d liked those records but then after we did Oath Of The Paladins, he told me: ‘I’ve got this other thing’. And that was Steröid. He told me it was a bit weird but that I might like it, which I hear a lot. Again, I fucking loved it. We’ve sold more copies than I thought we’d be capable of, to the extent that we’ll need to keep some back to have enough for when they tour. It’s kinda like, ‘What if egg punk… but Judas Priest?’ Or, ‘What if Devo… but metal?’ Questions no-one had thought to ask before. [laughs] That gets me to the core of things. It’s what gets me excited, hearing somebody say, ‘What about [mixing] this and that?’ Because metal is often guilty of saying, ‘What if we sound exactly like this other band?’ Gordo is a once in a lifetime talent though. Everything he does is incredible.”
Stygian Ruin – ‘Bed Of Spears / Ascension’ from A Violent Egress (2025)
Questing, deeply atmospheric synth-led blackened gear from Norway, Stygian Ruin’s A Violent Egress comprises two twenty minute “meditations on fury and sacrifice”. Imbued with a cinematic scope and raw as hell production value, this is a record full of tension and strange beauty.
CW: “Heavy black dungeon synth! [laughs] That’s what I call it, anyway. For me, this album has the best qualities of heavy metal: fist pumping and great big crescendos. It has the musical pay offs that metal has, but with that dark stygian synth sound and atmospherics that you might find in black metal. It’s a one man project – a guy from Norway; and again it’s one of those relationships that have come through the shop. I’d been dealing with Ixiol, who put out a load of Stygian releases, for years and I love that label. But Stygian just flew out the door so I contacted them to see if we could do a split release with them.”
Life After Death Festival
Now entering its third year, Crypt Of The Wizard’s small Walthamstow-based festival, Life After Death, aims to tie together the worldwide community that has been built around the label and shop, uniting many various friends and peers.
CW: “Fundamentally the festival grew out of a desire to promote the type of underground band we stock music by in the shop. As time has gone on we have begun to focus more and more on a cluster of underground labels who we feel are our peers and releasing incredible music. We wanted to start bringing bands over to the UK in a way that was meaningful. In the past I’d bring bands over but it was scattershot and we started to think that maybe a festival would work as we’d put so much energy into putting an audience together over the last decade. It was a bit of a punt but NTS were very helpful and backed us on the first one while we got on our feet which meant we had some institutional support. The foundational idea was to have no headliners, just good bands. Walthamstow Trades Hall is a remarkable old venue. It does everything from tea dances for older people to queer punk scene gigs and the board of people who run it are incredible. They are an exciting group of people who all want to do interesting things with their club.”
Life After Death festival runs on 20 & 21 February at Walthamstow Trades Hall
