There are places you shouldn’t visit after dark. And yet, somehow, you find yourself walking toward them anyway.
It’s not the crooked sign nailed to a fence post. Not the rusted gate with KEEP OUT scrawled across it in peeling paint. It’s certainly not the innkeeper — the one with the hollow eyes and the too-quiet voice — leaning in close to murmur, “Whatever you do, don’t go into those woods.”
Some places don’t need warning signs.
They have reputations instead. Writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe built entire worlds out of them. Painters like Henry Fuseli and Zdzisław Beksiński gave them faces. These places sit just beyond the edge of town, wrapped in trees and half-remembered stories, carrying histories too dark to write down — the kind that get whispered instead, passed hand to hand like something fragile, or dangerous. Ask the locals about it, and you’ll get a knowing look. Ask them to explain, and the conversation ends. That silence? That’s what pulls you closer.
Places like this exist in the world’s forgotten corners. And in the mind, if you let them.
Welcome to Illswich.
And welcome to Plankett’s Grove — the new album from Midnight Syndicate.
Released August 21st, this 18-track, 53-minute descent pulls Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka far from anywhere familiar — into a secluded village tucked deep in a mountain valley, hemmed in by forest, folklore, and secrets that seem entirely content to wait for nightfall. And if you’ve spent any time at all in Midnight Syndicate’s world, you already know exactly what comes next.
You simply enter.
A Road Less Traveled
For nearly three decades, Midnight Syndicate hasn’t just made albums — they’ve built doorways. Step through, and you’re somewhere else entirely. A haunted mansion, its halls thick with dust and memory. A forgotten cemetery, where the stones lean in to listen. A decadent nightclub, humming with something not quite alive. Every destination different, but every one drawing you into the same gothic dreamscape — shadow-drenched, fantastical, unmistakably theirs.
Plankett’s Grove opens a different door.
After the velvet-and-candlelight atmosphere of The Brimstone Club, Douglas and Goszka went looking for the opposite of grandeur. They found it in the woods — not the manicured, moonlit woods of gothic romance, but something older. Wilder. Less inclined to explain itself. Reminiscent of the old Nathaniel Hawthorne tale, Young Goodman Brown, where the experience in the woods is a dark, terrifying journey into a symbolic wilderness, mixed with a little madness.
Folk horror has been having a revival of sorts lately, all fashionable dread and cottagecore menace. But Midnight Syndicate isn’t borrowing the trend — they’re digging into what makes it work. Isolated communities. Rituals no one questions anymore. Superstitions treated as fact. The quiet, nagging suspicion that some old stories survive not because they’re charming, but because they’re true.
So, this isn’t a haunted attraction, dressed up and waiting for visitors. It’s the place a haunted attraction would take one look at and quietly back away from. This is the countryside. The road narrows. The trees crowd close, like they’re leaning in for a better look. And your phone, if you bothered to check, has no signal at all.
You’re on your own now.
Welcome to Illswich
And then, almost as if it heard you, the road opens. A cluster of rooftops. A church spire. Smoke curling from a chimney somewhere. The album’s first track, “Welcome to Illswich,” greets you like a good host should — warm, inviting, almost polite.
Don’t get too comfortable.
Illswich isn’t a ghost town, left to rot and be picked over by curious outsiders’ generations later. That was a deliberate choice on the duo’s part, and it changes everything. This place is alive. People live here. They raise families, tend gardens, ring church bells on Sunday mornings. Life goes on. And that, it turns out, is far more unsettling than any ruin could ever be — because a desolate village hands you a mystery. A place that hands you secrets. And secrets, unlike mysteries, are being kept on purpose.
The opening tracks — “Echoes of the Past,” “Bleak Provenance,” and “The Woods Are Watching.” And yes — the woods are watching.
The Folklore in the Trees
This is where Plankett’s Grove really shows its hand — not by telling you the story, but by scattering its pieces and letting you assemble them yourself.
The track titles alone read like torn pages from some forgotten ledger: “Lenore’s Curiosities.” “Plankett’s Curse.” “Hidden Grotto.” “Seeress.” “Call of the Moon.” Fragments. Nothing more. And that’s exactly the point.
There’s no narrator here, no steady hand guiding you through the footnotes. And thank goodness for that — because the moment you’re left alone with these fragments, your imagination does what it does best; it questions. Who is Lenore, and what exactly did she collect? What happened to Plankett, and why does a curse still carry his name? What’s hidden away in that grotto, tucked just out of sight? What does the Seeress know that the rest of Illswich doesn’t? And why — quite suddenly, quite insistently — has everyone turned their attention to the moon?
This is the secret Midnight Syndicate has mastered over three decades: they understand that music and imagination aren’t separate things — they’re collaborators. Their soundscapes hand you just enough to build a world, then step back and let you build it. You’re never locked inside someone else’s vision. You’re handed a doorway instead.
And you already know what happens to doorways in Illswich.
Eventually, you open it.
Into the Grove
By the time the title track arrives — “Plankett’s Grove” itself — the album has already pulled off something quietly clever. It’s made that name mean something. We’ve heard the whispers about Illswich. We’ve walked its streets and learned its history. We’ve been handed its mysteries, one fragment at a time, and followed the path deeper into the trees. Now, finally, we arrive at the place we’ve been hearing about all along.
And this is where the atmosphere stops setting the stage — and simply takes hold.
Edward Douglas and Gavin Goszka have always known that darkness doesn’t need volume. It doesn’t need a shriek around every corner. Sometimes it’s just wind moving through branches overhead. A sound in the distance you can’t quite place, and don’t particularly want to. The slow, creeping realization that you’ve been walking far longer than you meant to — and the grove, somehow, hasn’t ended.
“Plankett’s Grove” leans fully into that quieter kind of dread. It doesn’t chase you through the trees. It doesn’t need to. It simply lets you wander — and trusts your own senses to do the rest.
A Little Moonlight, a Little Madness
The middle stretch of the album keeps blurring the line between the natural and the something-else. “Eternal Horsemen.” “Sylvan Respite.” “Primal Instinct.” “Tainted Soil.” Titles that suggest the forest isn’t just a backdrop for whatever’s happening here. It’s a participant. Maybe the main one.
There’s something ancient about that idea, something older than Illswich itself. Long before haunted houses and horror movies gave us something to scream at, people were already telling stories about what lived far beyond. Forests were mystery. Mountains held spirits and legend. The night belonged to things nobody could quite see, only sense. Modern life — with its streetlights and Wi-Fi and endless comforting noise — has made it easy to forget that feeling ever existed.
Midnight Syndicate hands it back to you. All of it. Whether you asked for it or not.
And maybe that’s the real reason their music fits Halloween so perfectly. Underneath the costumes and the candy and the string lights shaped like bats; there’s something far older sitting quietly at the center of it all: our fascination with the things we can’t explain.
The Sound of a Story
But it isn’t only the woods doing the work. Listen closely, and you’ll notice the craftsmanship holding the whole illusion together.
Douglas has called this some of his favorite soundscape and sound-design work the duo has ever created, and honestly, it shows in every corner of Illswich. This isn’t orchestral music with a few spooky flourishes dusted on top for effect. The atmosphere isn’t decoration here — it’s structure. The music builds the emotional terrain, the ache and the unease underneath everything, while the sound design builds the physical one — the creak of branches, the hush of distance, the sense of space stretching out around you in the dark. Together, they stop feeling like a soundtrack about a place.
They start feeling like a transmission from one.
Or at least, that’s the impression it leaves. And maybe that’s the truly dangerous thing about Midnight Syndicate, three decades in — they haven’t lost the ability to make imaginary places feel suspiciously, uncomfortably real.
Real enough that some part of you starts to wonder if Illswich has always been there. Waiting.
What the Dark Retains
As the album winds toward its close, “Shanty in the Pines,” “The Choking Brambles,” and finally “What the Dark Retains” carry the journey to its shadowed end. But don’t expect a tidy resolution waiting for you there. Answers were never really the point.
The best folklore doesn’t tie itself up. It gives you a name. A place. A warning, maybe, and one particularly unsettling detail — and then leaves you to carry it around for the next twenty years, turning it over, never quite finding the ending. Plankett’s Grove honors that tradition faithfully. When the final notes fade out, Illswich doesn’t feel finished. It doesn’t feel gone. That’s the trick.
You can turn off the music. You can step away from the speakers, blink, and return to your ordinary world. But for 53 minutes, Midnight Syndicate gives you something increasingly hard to find: a reason to believe there are still corners of the world where the old stories haven’t quite died out. Places where folklore isn’t something printed neatly in a book, footnoted and filed away.
It’s something people remember instead.
The Verdict
Plankett’s Grove is a wonderful addition to the Midnight Syndicate library — and a particularly welcome one for anyone who loves folk horror, dark fantasy, gothic atmosphere, or the quieter side of Halloween. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you. It invites you deeper. And that, ultimately, is what makes it work.
You don’t so much listen to Plankett’s Grove as wander through it. You arrive in Illswich. You follow the road. You hear the stories the locals won’t quite finish. You step into the woods. And eventually you find the grove. Whether you come back out is entirely your business. I’d recommend going in anyway. Just don’t blame me if you hear something behind you.
Where to Listen
Plankett’s Grove is available now on CD and through major digital and streaming platforms. The physical release includes a six-panel color artwork booklet, with artwork by Pascal Casolari that perfectly complements the album’s misty, gothic world.
Explore the album and the rest of the Midnight Syndicate world at MidnightSyndicate.com. Written by Edward Mugarian for Halloween Living Magazine, celebrating the storytellers, dreamers, artists and midnight wanderers who keep the spirit of Halloween alive all year long.