Review: Fires in the Distance – Circadian Promise (2026)
Doom is the music of the self alone in the dark. It sits with grief and holds it, slow and low. Twice before, a recorded voice entered one of their songs, a man who looked at his own death and called it a plain ending. Circadian Promise brings in a different voice, one that says the self is part of everything around it, that what you fear losing dissolves back into the whole it came from. A new singer arrives to carry it, and the band that kept to the ground begins to rise.
Fires in the Distance are a melodic death and doom band from Connecticut, grown out of the solo recordings of guitarist and songwriter Yegor Savonin. On their first two albums, one song on each gave room to a spoken clip of Christopher Hitchens, the British-American writer and atheist. Dying of the cancer that took him in 2011, Hitchens turned down the comforts of religion, and he turned down the softer comfort of acceptance as well. He ran through the stages of grief and found rage beside the point. What he settled on was a plain ending, looked at with open eyes. His voice surfaces in “Elusive Light” on the 2020 debut Echoes from Deep November, and returns inside “Idiopathic Despair,” the closer of 2023’s Air Not Meant for Us, as the song’s narrator arrives at the same end. That was doom in its clearest form, one self alone with the end.
Circadian Promise, their third album, changes the voice at both ends. Kristian Grimaldi and his deep growl are gone. Brendan Hayter, who came up in the American black metal band Obsidian Tongue, takes over, and he brings a clean tenor, new to the band. The sampled voice changes too. In place of Hitchens, the record reaches for Alan Watts, the English writer who carried Zen and Eastern philosophy to Western listeners. Watts taught that the single self is a kind of illusion, a line the mind draws between a person and the world, and that what dies was always part of the whole it returns to. The self that doom leaves alone in the dark, Watts hands back to the world it came from.
One thread runs through all three records. The keyboards have been Savonin’s signature since the debut Echoes from Deep November, delicate and bright at the front of the music, carrying melodies of their own. Randy Slaugh’s orchestration surrounds them with strings, as it did on Air Not Meant for Us. On Circadian Promise they hold that same fragile clarity, threading one song into the next and keeping the band’s identity together across the change.
Caelan Stokkermans painted the cover, as he did the two records before it. Two women stand in a dark wood. One sits on the ground in a black mourning dress, head bowed, a rose in her hands and roses scattered through the grass. Behind her rises a second, pale and half see-through, veiled in white and crowned with flowers, watching the first. The title points to the body’s own clock, the daily turn from dark to light and back. The picture holds that turn between its two figures, one solid on the ground, one losing her outline into the trees behind her. A morning coming on, or an evening going down.
The turn happens in the open on “By This Time Tomorrow.” It stays lower and slower than anything else on the record, a sway close to the gothic doom of My Dying Bride, the English band whose grief shaped this whole corner of the music. They fold melodic death metal into their doom, and here the melodic side widens. Johan Reinholdz of Dark Tranquillity, one of the bands that founded the Swedish melodic death sound, cuts a guest solo through the doom. Inside the same song, the Watts recording surfaces, telling you that everything is change and the only calm comes from going with it. Behind that counsel sits his deeper one, that the self was always of a piece with the change around it. So the most doom-rooted song here, the one that keeps to the ground, is also where the record opens most, to the melody that lifts and to the voice that would undo the solitude doom is built on.
“Once the Silence Takes Your Place” is where the record follows that voice all the way up. Hayter’s cleans climb into the open, unguarded, and the keyboards spread wide behind them. The song finds the top of his range and holds there, the lone voice of doom reaching past the edges it used to keep. It is the most exposed the album lets itself be, a self testing whether it can let its outline go.
Circadian Promise is a good record, and a different kind of Fires in the Distance, yet the ground under it stays familiar. The keyboards are still at the front and the old slow doom still holds, so the new direction has something solid under it. That direction is up.
This is a passage the band had to walk, down into the ground Air Not Meant for Us lived in and up out of it, changed. The lone self that doom keeps in the dark begins to let its edges go, and the music climbs with it. The last song, “Agonal Dreaming,” named for the labored gasp of a body at the end of life, breaks off mid-breath. On the cover, one woman keeps to the ground while the other loses her outline into the trees, in a light that could be morning or could be dusk. It is the sound of that letting go. Whether the self has opened into something larger or simply ended, the band had to cross the dark to find out.
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