To build your own Haunted Mound, the NorCal rap collective founded by the ghoulishly gaudy rapper-producer Sematary, you’ll need the following essentials: undying affinity for Chief Keef’s clattering drill, Salem’s anesthetic witch house, and Yung Lean’s pitchy emo-rap; a deep reference bank of horror flicks and occult mythology; and more blood-stained True Religions than Mark Zuckerberg has gray T-shirts. With his long-awaited debut solo mixtape, the spectral October Country, original Haunted Mound member Ghost Mountain posits: What if the truest religion of all is the friends we made along the way?
The tape arrives six years after Sematary and Ghost Mountain christened Haunted Mound with the inaugural Grave House tape, and four years since Ghost Mountain acrimoniously split from the collective, quitting music altogether to pursue film school. In the years since, Sematary and his other associates (Buckshot and Hackle) have grown Haunted Mound into an underground phenomenon. While Sematary’s music has gotten harsher and more eclectic as his popularity has ballooned, his brags about cutters and Cadillacs have become as predictable as hitting the same haunted house three times in one season. His bombastic style has been missing its atmospheric foil since his and Ghost Mountain’s 2020 tape, Hundred Acre Wrist, where Ghost Mountain’s comparatively subdued vocals—more drained Wicca Phase than demonic Gucci Mane—and cryptic lyricism provided a crucial counterweight to Sematary’s gargling splatter raps.
After privately reconciling with Sematary, first as friends, then as creative collaborators, Ghost Mountain announced last year that he’d returned to Haunted Mound. October Country reckons with Ghost Mountain’s sudden departure and even less anticipated return to the studio, a story directly intertwined with his fractured-then-mended friendship with Sematary. With the two sharing executive production duties, October Country functions as a victorious reunion that rekindles their chemistry and revamps Haunted Mound’s palette with a tasteful elixir of backroad goth, chimeric folk, and hooky emo-rap. It’s the most sophisticated project either musician has ever been involved in, and it sets the bar for witch house revivalism just as a post-Snow Strippers deluge of vacant pastiche is due to flood the zeitgeist.
Although Sematary’s presence looms large over October Country’s autumnal production (Haunted Mound regular Oscar18 also contributes heavily), the record is very much a Ghost Mountain affair and plays to his strengths. Even Sematary’s sprightliest songs buckle under the weight of his deep-fried horrorcore delivery, but October Country tracks like “Kismet” and “By the Flame” are genuine pop tunes where Ghost Mountain’s vocals soar weightlessly atop the shattered synths and mucky guitars. In “Hovel,” his moans float like a Cure chorus, and in “Wayside,” his wispy harmonies swirl around the hook like lost souls. Haunted Mound’s elders, Bladee and Yung Lean, arrived at a similar nexus of stoic post-punk and melty emo rap on last year’s Psykos, but just as Los Angeles deathrock was to UK goth in the early ’80s, Ghost Mountain’s Americanized take on the idiom is grittier and more phantasmically stylized than his European counterparts.
When Sematary shows up, the two vocalists meet in the middle of the summoning circle: Ghost Mountain groaning unintelligible incantations on the Salem tribute “Damien,” Sematary taming his feral howls on the spellbindingly catchy “Highway Hex.” They didn’t need a remix to work it out, but Ghost Mountain’s fraught relationship with music was clearly still a tender subject during October Country’s creation. In “Highway Hex,” he sings about being caught “between who you’ve been and who you wanna be,” but ultimately promises to return to the passenger seat he left vacant. Sematary obliges: “If it isn’t you right next to me, it’ll be that shotgun on my seat.” Ghost Mountain speaks with even more metatextual candor on “By the Flame,” admitting to having felt like a husk of an artist with “no self, no life, no road,” but eventually realizing, upon picking through the “burn pile” of his music career, that he “might’ve misjudged” his path.
Ghost Mountain will turn 24 this year—a certified unc relative to his teen-filled fanbase—and October Country demonstrates his considerable growth from soul-reaper to soul-searcher. Your mid-20s are a time for reconsidering the impulsivity of adolescence, letting go of grudges and accepting that the world isn’t as black and white as it once seemed. Nuance and maturity might seem anathema to the perverse nihilism that Haunted Mound was founded on, but October Country proves otherwise. “All I want is to rectify,” Ghost Mountain wails during “Wayside.” And really, what’s more quintessentially supernatural than a restless spirit yearning for peace?
