Hear The Wytches’ eerie “Crying Clown” (and watch the acoustic video)

As if the title of The Wytches’ upcoming debut album, Annabel Dream Reader, didn’t already evoke Edgar Allan Poe, the band’s music seems to inhabit the same haunted shadows. The young British trio recorded Annabel at Toe Rag Studios, the room where The White Stripes famously capture Elephant, and there’s a sliver of The Stripes’ tuneful garage rock to The Wytches’ sound. But as heard on “Crying Clown”—debuted here, along with a video of leader Kristian Bell performing the song live and acoustic—there’s a brooding, gothic aura to the group that wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of an adaption of Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”