Paradise Lost aren’t gloomy all the time. When the death/doom icons’ frontman Nick Holmes video-calls Metal Hammer from his tour bus in Belgium, his Zoom profile picture is a disheveled Phil Mitchell clinging to a bottle of booze. But, since their 1988 founding, the Yorkshiremen have become synonymous with sonic sadness, and they’re set to continue apace with Ascension in September.
Preceded by recent lead single Silence Like The Grave, Paradise Lost’s 17th album will offer 10 more anthems of defeat, nihilism and negativity. From the title to the artwork and some of the lyrics, it also looks to be a particularly atheistic work from a collective who once said, “I think for anybody in the band to suddenly become a Christian, I would presume they’d gone mentally ill.”
