Paradise Lost has been a huge favorite of mine. I remember in 1996 when I first heard the band and I thought they were dreadful. I didn’t understand what the band was creating. When I heard One Second in the late 90’s I fell in love immediately. After a love affair which lasted many years I am so excited to hear about the upcoming Nuclear Blast Release. It’s expected to come out 1st of September 2017. The band teases us with a new song The Longest Winter. I have listened to it a lot and now I feel secure enough to write a few lines about it.
The Longest Winter is the first vitals since 2015 when the band delivered The Plague Within, an album many people including me thought was one of the best releases since their debut in 1990. I was excited about that record and I was eager and also a little bit nervous to take a first listen to the new song.
I listened, listened and listened. Sometimes with headphones, sometimes through speakers day and night. The song was on instant repeat. And I was feeling relieved, hypnotized and fascinated with how one of my favorite band always delivers.
With the Longest Winter, Nick Holmes gives us a mournful voice in the beginning of the song but also a precious death growl which sets the standard of the song even higher. The bands mission to sound even better than before and also to bring us back to their old death metal roots. It’s a powerful song and it also says a lot of the band. They are not afraid to look back but they always want to progress. The trend from Plague Within continues but now they add some melancholy a la ”Believe In Nothing ”. They also insert the doom-influence from In Requiem. They know how to play catchy yet heavy melancholy riffs and to bring attention to the fans ear canals.
The lyrics in Longest Winter are about the 30 mile exclusion zone in Chernobyl and how the wildlife was beginning to flourish after the disaster.
The song is definitely a great return for the band and it generates enormously high expectations within me for their upcoming album. September cannot come soon enough!
-DoomsdaysJesus
