Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Release date: 19. 9. 2025
Production: Paradise Lost
Album length: 51.02 min
Genre: Gothic Metal / Doom Metal / Death Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Paradise Lost, the undisputed icons of gothic and doom metal and British pioneers of the genre, gave birth last September to their seventeenth studio album, “Ascension”. It follows its predecessor “Obsidian” after five years, so the wait between records stretched out a bit. Honestly, we can be pretty grateful for that, even though the band actually started seriously working on the new material back in mid-2023! Because what we’ve got here is a brilliantly polished new studio effort from a legendary band that knows how, still knows how, and can still deliver the best!
On the new album, Paradise Lost cunningly stick to the tried-and-tested musical formula they developed themselves, the one that embodies their titanic body of work. With the songwriting focus, of course, that they returned to on “Paradise Lost” (2005) and that we’ve been following for the past 20 years.
On “Ascension”, Paradise Lost are exactly what we want them to be. Want them to be today, when the band has nothing left to prove and could happily retire any time. But why would they, when they can still deliver studio excellence? The production is top-notch, with strong contrasts between the three elemental building blocks of the sound, and Nick Holmes’ vocals are once again perfectly woven in, alternating phenomenally between growls and clean singing. The riffs stomp around godlessly! They’re ominous and crunch with a gigantic, avalanche-like heaviness that flattens everything in its path! In the intensely dynamic contrast of the production sit the drums, backed by the sheer volume of the bass lines. Into those slow lines MacKintosh once again threads melancholic, dark guitar harmonies, one of the central trademarks of Paradise Lost’s recognizable gothic doom chill. “Ascension” sounds incredibly compact, focused, accomplished. Honed. Brutally elemental, direct and devastating. It’s precisely this old-school raw elemental quality that keeps that eternal appeal you simply can’t resist with Paradise Lost. All the way back to the band’s beginnings. “Ascension” is also an album that needs a few spins to settle in. Like most Paradise Lost albums, because it carries a unique atmosphere that only Paradise Lost are known for. But once that ‘fateful creature of the final hour’ grabs you, it sucks you in irreversibly and doesn’t let go of its claws for quite a while. Simple as that. “Ascension” is another Paradise Lost album that’s quickly condemned to heavy repeat plays in the CD player.
And yes. Your blood freezes instantly on contact with the album. Not just because of the excellent musical substance, but already at the sight of the cover of “Ascension”. For it, Paradise Lost picked an artwork called The Court Of Death (1870-1902) by the renowned British artist George Frederic Watts, which hangs in the Tate gallery in London. The painting shows Death in the form of an angel seated on a throne. At his sides stand allegorical figures of Silence and Mystery, guarding the sunrise and the star of hope. There are also a warrior and a duke laying their sword and crown before the throne, expressing the fact that you can’t take a single thing with you from this world to the next.
A quick run through the material. The elemental opener Serpent on the Cross, after its intro and a core phrase, unfolds in a very classic way, drawing parallels all the way back to the first half of the nineties, straight into the days of “Shades Of God”. The doom slap of Tyrants Serenade could be a sped-up version of the stomping Beneath Broken Earth from “The Plague Within” (2015), and Salvation gets even closer to that comparison. A particularly finely honed lament on the album is Lay A Wreath Upon The World, in which the band masterfully builds an atmosphere of hopeless doom, starting with an acoustic shiver in the intro backed by a sound imitating strings. Here the band shows off its compositional maturity as it wriggles out of the doom metal framework through a string of post-apocalyptic vistas of bittersweet hopelessness! In this track, don’t overlook the stamp left by Heather Thompson-MacKintosh’s female vocals. Then there’s Savage Days, with its cunning integration of keyboards that, against the gleaming vise of the black riffing, brings exceptional sonic dynamics, and Holmes squeezes out even more emotional charge when he decides to sing the chorus in clean vocals! Silence Like A Grave, and Deceivers just before the end of the album, are moments that, in the band’s new era, look for a stronger link to the classics “Icon” and “Draconian Times”.
Truth is, the band hasn’t done anything with the new album that would surprise you. The framework of their seventeenth studio album was expected. But Paradise Lost have internalized and refined their formula so thoroughly that they basically can’t miss with new releases (as long as they stick to the cornerstones of that signature formula, of course). Even though there’s a huge amount of routine and experience behind the creation of this album, “Ascension” also clearly radiates a note of artistic maturity. These are the album’s finer touches, which Paradise Lost work into the arrangements with great craftsmanship, without sacrificing a shred of rawness. On top of that well-known Paradise Lost recipe, all of this is of course a hugely rewarding exercise, since the band develops excellent dynamics on the new album too, wrapped in the almost proverbial ferocity of dark atmospheric sermonizing, which hands the legends one more triumphant act in a long-lived career. An exceptionally compact and ferocious album from the undisputed kings of gothic twilight!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Serpent On The Cross
2. Tyrants Serenade
3. Salvation
4. Silence Like The Grave
5. Lay A Wreath Upon The World
6. Diluvium
7. Savage Days
8. Sirens
9. Deceivers
10. The Precipice
Lineup:
Nick Holmes – vocals
Greg MacKintosh – guitar
Aaron Aedy – guitar
Steve Edmondson – bass guitar
Guido Montanarini – drums
Guest musicians:
Heather Thompson-Mackintosh – backing vocals on track no. 5.
Alan Averill – backing vocals on track no. 3.
Lawrence Mackrory – backing vocals on tracks no. 2, 3, 10 and 12.
