Coil – Winter Solstice: North Album Review

The last of Coil’s solstice recordings is a high water mark of their last, greatest era.

7:03 AM PST December 21, 2025 marks the winter solstice, the moment in the Northern Hemisphere when the Earth is furthest from the sun. It’s the longest, coldest, darkest night of the year, the summer seeming a distant dream, winds howling outside the front door, rattling winds and icicles like lost ivory while the warm-blooded gather and shiver indoors, sheltered from the shrieking elements. It’s a dark, lonely, lonesome, fearsome holiday that’s also, paradoxically, bright, full of warmth, light, and companionship. Pagan cultures celebrate their midwinter rites around the Winter Solstice, lighting the yule log to keep the freezing darkness at bay. Midwinter rites like Yuletide may occur on the darkest, coldest night of the year, but they’re a celebration of renewal, of the return of the sun, the springtime, and the sweetness and abundance that comes with it.

In 1998, influential industrial/electronic/experimental band Coil released a series of vinyl 7″‘s and EPs of recordings they’d made on the solstices and equinoxes of the previous year on their Threshold House label. Beginning with the Moon’s Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull EP on the Vernal Equinox, the series found Coil navigating their way out of the creative cul-de-sac of the Backwards recording sessions for Nothing Records, ditching the death disco and aggro industrial aesthetics of their first decade with a heady mixture of avant-garde electronics like glitch or IDM, Western mysticism, and heavy, heady drones. If Coil’s earliest music was dedicated to Mars – patron saint of aggression and male sexuality – Coil 2.0 was all about The Moon.

On North, the core duo of Jhonn Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson are joined by arch minimalists Drew McDowall; Rose McDowall, of Strawberry Switchblade; Robert Lee, of the band Sorrow; and William Breeze, the head of the Ordo Templi Orientis – the magical group founded by Aleister Crowley after splitting with the Golden Dawn. The added players’ additional instruments and associations help make Coil’s pop cultural occult correspondences even more overt, connecting the dots from Tiny Tim to Western esotericism, the holy minimalism of The Velvet Underground and their arty avant-garde New York cohorts like La Monte Young joining forces with the British folk revival of Shirley Collins and the Incredible String Band, becoming a kind of occult history of the 20th Century, with pop culture and druggy excess pushing humanity to a new age of Enlightenment.

Things begin with “A White Rainbow,” built around a looping vocal mantra from Balance over increasingly unsteady electronics. Beginning with a warm, pulsing hypnotic drone from Drew McDowall’s modular synth, sounding like colorful lights reflecting on snow, before shortly settling into an electric viola drone from William Breeze and a steely Autechre beat, all helping to set the stage for Balance’s hierophant vocal, the emotional and spiritual center of the entire session. Composed on the spot, Balance returns to the invocation of the first equinox recording – “moon’s milk spills from my unquiet skull” – the ethos of not only the equinox recordings but Coil’s entire final era.

Although originally inspired by the heavily masculine energy of Mars and the Sun, Coil seemed to be turning to the lunar and irrational in their last decade, trading in the harsh militarism of Scatology or Horse Rotorvator for the Surrealist’s “continual derangement of the senses.” After invoking The Moon, Balance continues “A lunar ascension, a solar declension.” Although they couldn’t possibly have known what was in store in the coming century, Coil seemed to scent the breeze, turning their back on the Solar Logos and the coming technocracy that is currently reeking such havoc on our current world.

On “North,” Balance seems to reference various pagan myths from around the world of a dog that swallows the sun, according to various interpretations, but the real motivation may’ve been far more personal. He intones “the black dog has no owner” over a moonlit pond of eerie drones and harsh screeching, quite possibly referencing his own depression, borrowing Winston Churchill’s metaphor for melancholy.

He goes full guided meditation on “Magnetic North,” whispering of “blue sapphire six-pointed stars” and “roses blooming beneath the skull.” Even with 30 years study, analysis, and exegesis, i’m still not entirely sure what 100% of the symbolism means. It’s dense shit, despite its airy, vaporous bedrock of drone.

Things take a sharp 90-degree turn with “Christmas Is Now Drawing Near,” ditching the Western occultism and avant-garde electronics for Rose McDowall’s chilling Old Testament vocal over mysterious Marble Index harmoniums, perfumed and exotic as the Nativity, floating on the midwinter breeze like Frankincense vespers.

Generally speaking, i try and tread lightly with this kind of pop cultural exegesis, as it’s way too easy to make anything mean anything and it’s just a small stumble into paranoid Ancient Aliens YouTube conspiracy. I’m more comfortable doing so with Coil, as these kinds of occult considerations were explicit and overt. Each of the Equinox/Solstice recordings were recorded the previous year, in 1997, beginning at the precise moment of the Solstice. The psychic archaeology was very much intentional, as well. Teasing out the darkness lurking beneath mass media and pop culture was one of the initial inspirations from the very beginning of Throbbing Gristle, transforming a popular suicide spot into a cheesy Abba album cover while drawing out the savage colonialism lurking beneath lounge music.

Coil were sensitive to and interested in these occult energies but they weren’t soothsayers. They never could’ve known what the first quarter of the 21st Century would have in store, how something as simple as wireless internet and powerful, portable computers could more-or-less dismantle culture and consensual reality in 15 years or less.

Looking at the state of the world, it’s no stretch to say that something is deeply out of whack with these subtle energies and currents. Instead of trying to cure hunger or illness, the solar Logos strives to remove the barest hint of uncertainty, allowing hypercapitalists to reap maximal profits. Instead of embracing energy, innovation, impetus, momentum, Mars just seeks to bully and intimidate, transforming the world into a Thunderdome, devoid of empathy or basic care.

Coil intended these equinox/solstice recordings as a magical ritual, recoded in their home studio and broadcast into the cosmos. Here, in the dregs on 2025, take the opportunity to give Winter Solstice: North a listen, acting as a filter, cleaning and clearing the murk of the Collective Unconscious, returning things to their natural order.