Radio Playlist Update: Warning, Fires in the Distance, Temple of Void
Radio Playlist Update: Warning, Fires in the Distance, Temple of Void
Tagged: UK
The Yorkshire Gothic: Paradise Lost’s Gothic at Thirty-Five
Paradise Lost’s Gothic turned thirty-five in March 2026. The album dragged the English Gothic literary tradition, two centuries of ruined houses and English moors running from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in 1847, into 1991 death metal. Five Halifax kids recorded it fifteen miles from where Brontë walked, building through accident the vocabulary that symphonic gothic metal would later exhaust through repetition. The new Peaceville reissue is the occasion to hear Gothic for what it always was: an English literary tradition arriving in 1991 by way of a Halifax death metal band who had the Brontës in their water and Milton in their name.
Playlist Update 7.11.2025: Evoken; Toilet Snake; Coltsblood
Playlist Update 7.11.2025: Evoken; Toilet Snake; Coltsblood
Playlist Update: Lights of Vimana; Pilgrimage; A Dream of Poe
Playlist Update: Lights of Vimana; Pilgrimage; A Dream of Poe
Review: Paradise Lost – Ascension (2025)
Paradise Lost’s seventeenth album arrives as their most commanding release since Faith Divides Us, Death Unites Us. It does not attempt reinvention, but it draws together every strand of the band’s history into a single, coherent vision: the suffocating density of doom, the dramatic sweep of gothic textures, the grit of harsh vocals, and the melancholy of melody. What emerges is a definitive statement that feels alive, sharpened, and relevant.
The Sound of Gray: Revisiting Warning – Watching From a Distance
Watching from a Distance, released in 2006, stands with quiet certainty. Formed in the mid-nineties in Harlow, Essex, Warning was built around the voice and guitar of Patrick Walker, whose writing shaped the band’s identity – slow-moving, unadorned, and resolute-delivering doom metal stripped to its most human core.
Playlist Update: Nomadic Rituals; Sun of the Dying; Pale Keeper
Playlist Update: Nomadic Rituals; Sun of the Dying; Pale Keeper
After the Sabbath: Introduction
What was it about Black Sabbath that made them one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th century? What caused a strange blues-rock band from the late ’60s to shake an entire generation awake and draw them in? What makes a band, without even trying, become a cornerstone – if not the cornerstone – of an entire genre?
After the Sabbath: Experiment and Fracture (1973–75) | Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage
This time I’ll start with a question. I genuinely don’t understand why so many Sabbath fans seem to believe that the Ozzy era ended after their fourth album. That view is completely off, baseless, and casually erases some of the strongest material the band ever recorded.
After the Sabbath: The Disintegration (1976–78) | Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die!
Technical Ecstasy came out in 1976, during a time when tensions between Ozzy and the rest of the band were reaching a breaking point. It ended with his not-so-final departure after the recording sessions. Never Say Die! was released in 1978, after Ozzy returned to the band – but only briefly.