Boar God - Hunting Season
Some bands invent genre descriptions because existing terminology has become inconvenient. Others do it because two words can sometimes describe their music more effectively than several paragraphs. In the case of Montreal trio Boar God, the term “Ghost Punk” feels particularly appropriate, capturing music that is simultaneously physical and spectral, built from enormous guitars, repetitive rhythms and dissonance but continually haunted by drone, psychedelia and shoegaze.
That tension lies at the centre of Hunting Season, Boar God's second full-length album, due for release on November 6, 2026. Across nine tracks, the group brings together noise rock, post-punk, shoegaze, drone and psychedelic rock, creating music in which atmosphere does not soften the heaviness but makes it considerably stranger.
Boar God originated around guitarist and vocalist Eric Bent, with an early incarnation forming in Montreal during the middle of the 2010s. Following an EP in 2018, the group released its first album, Forma, in January 2019. That record established many of the characteristics that continue to define Boar God: extended structures, saturated and dissonant guitars, hypnotic repetition and a tendency for noise rock, post-punk and drone to gradually dissolve into one another.
The group's influences provide useful coordinates without completely explaining the result. Killing Joke, Sonic Youth, Melvins and Unwound account for some of the abrasion, repetition and rhythmic weight, while Bailterspace, Swervedriver and Cloakroom point towards a heavier and more textural relationship with shoegaze. Boar God consequently sit some distance from the genre's more delicate and dreamlike traditions. Their haze has considerably sharper edges.
The 2020 EP Near Extinction pushed the group's music towards more experimental and progressive territory while retaining its overwhelming guitar density. Recorded during the winter in a family house in Mont-Tremblant, its four songs explored different aspects of loss, creating an unusual contrast between the intimacy of the circumstances surrounding the recording and the enormous scale of the music itself. The two-track Birthplace/Inside followed in 2022 before Boar God entered a relatively quiet period.
Hunting Season therefore represents a significant return.
The current group centres on Eric Bent on guitars and lead vocals, Sean Zumbusch on bass, modular synthesizer and vocals, and Zef Fiola on drums and vocals. The album sessions also credit Joseph Fiola with drums throughout the record and backing vocals on several tracks, while Chance Hutchinson contributes vocals to “Broken Clock Brain” and Robyn Grey plays piano on “White Reindeer.”
The album contains nine tracks: “Crashing Waves,” “Hunting Season,” “Witch Engine,” “Broken Clock Brain,” “The Recruit,” “Homeless Dreaming,” “Ghost Speak,” “Chicken Wire” and “White Reindeer.” The title track, already available ahead of the album, provides the first substantial indication of how Boar God's sound has developed during their absence.
The contrast at the heart of their self-described Ghost Punk remains intact. The music is grounded in something bodily and almost primitive, with heavy rhythms and dense guitars providing a physical foundation, while drones, psychedelic textures and electronic frequencies create the impression of something less tangible moving behind them.
The addition of Zumbusch's modular synthesizer is particularly interesting in this respect. Boar God's earlier music already contained an atmospheric dimension, but electronics provide another way of extending sounds beyond the conventional boundaries of guitar, bass and drums. Synthesizer textures can merge with feedback and drone until the distinction between instrument and atmosphere becomes increasingly difficult to identify.
That expansion seems particularly appropriate for an album concerned with apocalypse, paranoia, mental instability, destruction, ghosts and vengeful spirits. Boar God have described the record as emerging from a period marked by instability and uncertainty, and their music appears to translate those conditions into an environment where the physical and metaphysical continually overlap.
This is what makes the band's Ghost Punk description more useful than it initially appears. The “punk” component represents impact, confrontation and the material world of flesh, blood and bone, while the “ghost” suggests everything that cannot quite be touched or clearly understood. Hunting Season appears interested in occupying both spaces simultaneously.
The title itself reinforces that unease. A hunting season establishes a period during which something becomes legitimate prey, immediately raising the question of who is hunting and who is being hunted. Within music already preoccupied with paranoia, destruction and supernatural imagery, that ambiguity creates an atmosphere in which danger can arrive from outside or emerge from somewhere considerably less identifiable.
Musically, the band's influences allow those ideas to take several forms. The mechanical intensity associated with Killing Joke can coexist with the dissonance of Sonic Youth and Unwound, while the enormous guitar presence associated with Swervedriver and Cloakroom pushes the music towards shoegaze without removing its aggression. The result is less about combining genres than finding the territory where their darker characteristics overlap.
Hunting Season was recorded and mixed by Ky Brooks at Error 403 during the summer and autumn of 2025, before being mastered by Richard White. The visual presentation extends the album's atmosphere through Ferryland and Portugal Cove, two photographs from Ben Hansen's 1977 Newfoundland Portfolio.
Within Boar God's discography, the album appears to connect the different directions explored during the previous decade. Forma established the foundations of their dense drone-punk language, while Near Extinction pushed that sound towards more experimental territory. Hunting Season seems prepared to make the environment larger again, introducing additional electronic and atmospheric possibilities without sacrificing the physical violence that has always occupied the centre of the group.
After several relatively quiet years, Boar God are therefore not returning by making their music easier to categorise. They are doing almost the opposite, allowing noise rock, post-punk, shoegaze, drone and psychedelia to bleed further into one another until the boundaries become increasingly irrelevant.
Perhaps “Ghost Punk” really is the simplest description after all. Hunting Season promises music with its feet planted firmly in the physical world while something considerably less reassuring moves through the fog behind it.
And Boar God's recommendation to listen at maximum volume makes perfect sense. Some ghosts apparently have no interest in whispering.
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