Review: Hooded Menace – Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration (2025)

On their seventh album, Finland’s Hooded Menace take a more melodic turn. The shift feels unexpected yet earned, the kind that comes after years of refining one approach until it breaks open. The sound stays heavy and slow, but melody now carries the direction. It’s a subtle surprise, indeed: clear, confident, and fully integrated into the group’s language.

“Twilight Passages” opens with slow synths in the band’s trademark style, steeped in 70s horror atmosphere. It sets the familiar mood: dark, cinematic, unhurried; before “Pale Masquerade” locks into motion, a powerful track with a firm hook and sharp momentum that sets the album in the right lane of the ride to come.

“Portrait Without a Face” marks the record’s pivot toward melody. The guitars build long, defined phrases that guide the track’s flow, along with stretching cello parts. Yes, we are still on that lane, hold tight. “Daughters of Lingering Pain” expands that language, keeping the pace slow and under control – this is exactly where Paradise Lost comes to mind.

“Lugubrious Dance” leans closer to classic heavy metal. A long track built around guitar solos and tight rhythm, it feels heavy, confident, and fun. It stands as one of the strongest points on the album because everything connects: the riffs, the pacing, the tone, all working together with a sense of ease and breeze.

Then comes “Save a Prayer”. Hooded Menace reshape a Duran Duran song into something stripped and severe, but surprisingly measured. The accompanying video, filled with Goth imagery and gloom, bridges the world of 80’s romantic darkness with doom’s heavier pulse. It works as a mirror, a reminder that both scenes share a fixation with decay and desire, although it might raise some eyebrows among those who expect the band to stay buried in the crypt.

There is, obviously, a deliberate irony here. The band knows exactly what they’re touching: a song built on elegance, escape and glamour – and they drag it through their own terrain until the polish turns to dust. The line between glamour and gloom was never too wide, and Hooded Menace walk in it with a striking confidence. Simon Le Bon would probably, if not strangely, approve.

The closer, “Into Haunted Oblivion”, runs close to ten minutes, built on patience and tension. It feels like a return to familiar ground, expanded and sharpened, closing an album that carries more surprises than expected with a final sense of control.

Lachrymose Monuments of Obscuration shows a band on the move. The atmosphere and heaviness remain, yet the form keeps shifting. Hooded Menace write with the confidence of a group unafraid to open their sound, letting melody and precision take them somewhere new. Seven albums in, they continue to evolve without shedding their past; still unmistakably themselves, but not standing still.

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