PARADISE LOST's new album is almost finished
06-03-2025
In a new interview with Chile’s PowerOfMetal.cl, guitarist Greg Mackintosh of British gothic metal pioneers PARADISE LOST was asked if he and his bandmates are working on the follow-up to their latest album, “Obsidian”, which was released in May 2020 via Nuclear Blast. He responded: “Yeah. It’s already halfway recorded. Next week I go to Sweden to finish off recording vocals, and then we mix it and master it and then we give it to the label. And I think it’s coming out, like, September time. So, yeah, it’s almost finished. It’s been the longest time we’ve ever had between albums. But that’s kind of because of the pandemic as well… So shit happens. And, yeah, hopefully it’ll come out September, October time this year.”
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their fourth album, “Icon”, British gothic metal pioneers PARADISE LOST re-recorded the LP for a special new release in 2023. For the release, the band released the re-recorded version of the album’s legendary opener ‘Embers Fire’, including a lyric video.
Watch the previously re-recorded version of ‘Widow’ below
Watch the original video for ‘Widow’ below
“Icon 30” track listing:
01. Embers Fire
02. Remembrance
03. Forging Sympathy
04. Joys Of The Emptiness
05. Dying Freedom
06. Widow
07. Colossal Rains
08. Weeping Words
09. Poison
10. True Belief
11. Shallow Seasons
12. Christendom
13. Deus Misereatur
PARADISE LOST frontman Nick Holmes previously stated about the band’s decision to re-record “Icon”: “Our specific record deal around the time we signed for the ‘Icon’ album meant we would never actually own the rights to our music or artwork, so going forward, to reissue the album ourselves for the 30th anniversary, it was necessary to re-record and completely re-do the album cover. Re-recording ‘Icon’ has not only enabled us to release it as a series of collectors editions on vinyl, but it was also great to revisit some songs from a lifetime ago. Nothing can replace those original recordings or ever will, they are a nostalgic part of all our lives but it has been a lot of fun revisiting those early [Music For Nations] days once again, and I hope the end result displays that!”
“Icon” marked a departure from the death-doom sound of PARADISE LOST‘s early work and was the last album to feature Matthew Archer on drums.
The album’s opening track ‘Ember’s Fire’ won an MTV Headbanger’s Ball viewers award for best heavy metal video of the year.
In February 2018, “Icon” was inducted into the Decibel “Hall Of Fame”, with the magazine naming it influential to the development of the gothic metal subgenre.
Formed in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1988, PARADISE LOST were unlikely candidates for metal glory when they slithered from the shadows and infiltrated the U.K. underground. But not content with spawning an entire subgenre with early death/doom masterpiece “Gothic” nor with conquering the metal mainstream with the balls-out power of 1995’s “Draconian Times”, they have subsequently traversed multiple genre boundaries with skill and grace, evolving through the pitch-black alt-rock mastery of 1990s classics “One Second” and “Host” to the muscular but ornate grandeur of 2009’s “Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us” and “Tragic Idol” (2012),with the nonchalant finesse of grand masters. The band’s “The Plague Within” (2015) and “Medusa” (2017) albums saw a much-celebrated return to brutal, old-school thinking, via two crushing monoliths to slow-motion death and spiritual defeat.
PARADISE LOST‘s latest album, “Obsidian”, was released in May 2020 via Nuclear Blast.
In 2008, speaking to Kerrang! about the album’s music, Nick Holmes remembered:
“We were pretty much the first band to coin the phrase ‘gothic metal’ so I don’t have a problem with that label. We’ve actually done gothier albums than Icon, but if people want to say that it sums up something that’s fine with me. At the time there was also black metal, thrash metal and everyone wanted to describe what type of something was so we went ‘Okay, we’ve got The Sisters of Mercy elements in our music, let’s call it goth metal’. We were getting better as musicians as well and I was hopefully getting better as a vocalist. When that happens you want to fine-tune what you’re doing. It’s also about not wanting to get stuck or pigeonholed into one particular musical place. We’ve kept the whole gothic thing going right throughout our career, but we did want to do something a little different. With the vocals, a lot of it was kind of shouting in key as opposed to just shouting, it’s okay singing like Beelzebub, but your voice can get into trouble if you have a big tour.”
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