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Salem’s first two EPs came out in 2008. One was called “Yes I Smoke Crack” and the other was “Water,” and between them they set the terms for everything people said about the band afterward. Jack Donoghue and John Holland had been making music since 2006 in Holland’s home studio in Michigan, with Heather Marlatt in the group by 2007 or so (sources disagree on the exact year). By the time “King Night” came out in 2010, the story about them was bigger than the facts anyone could confirm. The version that circulated had truck-stop hustling, addiction, trauma and self-harm in it, and the band did very little to correct it. Donoghue told XLR8R he’d made a song while “really, really high on OxyContin,” and told Dazed that fans were always offering them drugs and that the drugs didn’t shape the music. Both of those can be true, and the band was content to let the gap between them stand.

“King Night” is slow. It takes the chopped-and-screwed template from Southern rap, vocals dropped in pitch and tempos stretched, and puts it under shoegaze haze, trance synth lines and trap drums. The press tried drag, ghost step and witch house, and none of the labels fit well. The record also took heat, in particular for the pitched-down rapping on “Trapdoor,” which critics read as appropriation of Black Southern rap with no acknowledgment of where the technique came from. That criticism has stayed attached to the album, and it’s part of why “King Night” is harder to love uncritically than its reputation suggests.

Travis Egedy, who records as Pictureplane, came up with “witch house” in December 2009 as a joke with a friend, and he has said he regretted how fast it turned into a real category. His view was that naming something changes it and tends to kill it. The aesthetic that grew up around the term, triangles and crosses and fonts nobody could read, spread across Tumblr and blogs, and Salem got the credit and the blame. Donoghue and Holland have said they’re interested in the occult but don’t find it easy to discuss, and Donoghue told Dazed he doesn’t want people liking the band under false pretenses. That reluctance sits oddly with the black-metal-adjacent imagery that followed them around.

They were booed offstage a few songs into a South by Southwest set in 2010. Donoghue has said they only started playing live because somebody offered to fly them to Rome, and it showed. By 2012 the band had more or less gone quiet, and the scene around witch house dispersed into hyperpop and various strains of dark electronic music that don’t use the name. Eight years later they came back with the “Stay Down” mixtape and then the album “Fires in Heaven,” recorded by Holland and Donoghue alone. Marlatt wasn’t part of it. She posted on Instagram accusing them of forcing her out, and the dispute remains unresolved in public. After all that time, the thing Salem never explained is still unexplained, and the people who liked that about them are probably still happy.