herbie the rabbit turns the mob around on new single ‘Burn the Witch’

‘Burn the Witch’ begins with an accusation, but herbie the rabbit is far more interested in the people standing around and watching.

The first single from Dan Marsh’s new solo project takes aim at conformity, complicity and the ease with which hearsay can harden into accepted truth. But instead of writing a straightforward protest song, he approaches the subject with dark humour and a kind of detached fury, turning our attention towards the uncomfortable space between believing something and simply going along with it.

The central question is not whether crowds can be wrong; history has settled that often enough. It's how quickly an individual can surrender responsibility once everyone around them appears convinced.

Produced by M83’s Jordan Lawlor, ‘Burn the Witch’ gives those ideas a musical setting that feels catchy enough to disguise the menace underneath. Marsh’s songwriting thrives on that contradiction, as the song can initially pass as wry and melodic, only for its implications to become increasingly difficult to shrug off.

There's also something significant about hearing the artist step out from Ubiquity Machine and place himself entirely at the centre of a new project. If anything, the solo format seems to sharpen the narrative voice, allowing the sardonic humour and unease to sit closer to the surface than anything that came before.

As the opening chapter of herbie the rabbit, it's an intriguing one: tuneful, unsettling and deliberately provocative without collapsing into empty outrage.

‘Burn the Witch’ asks who is really responsible when everybody agrees to look the other way. The answer, unsurprisingly, is not particularly comfortable.