Ashes and Innocence: St. October - Mourning Star (Track Review) Released: 10/22/25

 

St. October has built Salem into something far greater than a concept album; it is becoming a full emotional reckoning with one of history's most brutal episodes of mass hysteria and injustice, and "Mourning Star," the second revealed track on the record, may be its most devastating entry yet. Where "Burn" places the listener inside the machinery of accusation and execution, and "Sweet Succubi" channeled the fury of the condemned reborn, "Mourning Star" strips everything back to the rawest, most human layer of the Salem Witch Trials narrative: the innocence. This is the perspective of those who were truly blameless, women and men swallowed whole by fear, superstition, and the cruelty of a community that chose accusation over truth. It is a grief-soaked, haunting piece of music, and in the hands of this Iowa quartet, it becomes something genuinely heartbreaking.

Monica Leibert carries "Mourning Star" with a performance that feels less like singing and more like testimony. Her voice here is not the seductress of "Sweet Succubi" or even the defiant condemned of "Burn," it is something quieter and more devastating, the sound of someone bearing witness to an injustice they cannot stop and cannot survive. She moves through the track with a spectral grace, her melodic passages aching with the kind of sorrow that only comes from wrongful suffering, from being destroyed by the very community that should have protected you. When the track demands weight, she delivers it without theatrics, grounding every moment in an emotional truth that is impossible to shake. Dustin Leibert's guitar work serves as the ideal companion to her performance, his melodic lines carrying a mournful, elegiac quality that underscores the track's themes of loss and injustice without ever tipping into sentimentality.

Beneath the melody, the rhythm section builds a foundation of quiet devastation. Summerson's bass moves through "Mourning Star" with a heavy, sorrowful deliberateness, not the predatory pulse of "Sweet Succubi" or the fatalistic march of "Burn," but something closer to a dirge, each note weighted with the knowledge of what is coming and the helplessness of those who cannot prevent it. His tone is thick with grief, reinforcing the track's central tragedy at every turn. Pement's drumming reflects that same emotional intelligence, his patterns restrained and ceremonial where the song calls for solemnity, and explosive where the injustice demands to be felt at full volume. He gives "Mourning Star" both its stillness and its fury, understanding that a song about innocent suffering needs room to breathe as much as it needs moments that hit like a verdict.

"Mourning Star" is the emotional core of Salem, the still and aching center around which the album's darker, more volatile tracks orbit. It is St. October at their most vulnerable and their most precise, using the full breadth of their blackened death sound to honor a tragedy that deserves more than footnotes in history books. Across three singles now, the band has mapped the Salem Witch Trials from accusation to revenge to grief, and each track has revealed another facet of a story that is as much about the enduring cruelty of false judgment as it is about any specific historical moment. "Mourning Star" does not rage. It mourns. And in doing so, it may be the most powerful thing St. October has ever written.

Here is Mourning Star:

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