“So hopefully it’ll sound like a fresh thing to a lot of people. “At this point there aren’t a lot of people alive that remember the ’80s goth scene!” laughs Greg. Most noticeably, the record boasts several songs that draw heavily from the much-loved, Kohl-encrusted days of ’80s gothic rock: in particular, newly-minted PL anthems Ghosts is a guaranteed dancefloor-filler at any discerning goth nightclub. From the deceptive elegance and dual atmospheres of opener Darker Thoughts through to the crushing, baroque doom of war-torn closer Ravenghast, Obsidian reveals a band in masterful control of a broad array of vital ideas. The sixteenth Paradise Lost studio album, Obsidian eschews its immediate predecessors’ gruesome, myopic approach in favour of a richer and more dynamic deluge of black shades. So there’s a bit more variety on this one.” On Medusa we did the whole fuzzed-out slow thing, throughout the entire record, so if it was that again it would bore me as much as anyone else. I just wanted it to sound a little more polished than the last one and a little less caveman-like in the rhythm section! (laughs) I suppose that was the only brief, really. The pressure always came from ourselves anyway. “We never went through that thing of signing to big labels and being under constant pressure. “When we came to write this record, we just sat down, had a think about it and said ‘Let’s see what comes out!'” says Greg. In keeping with their unerring refusal to deliver the expected, 2020 brings one of the band’s most diverse and devastating creations to date. Consistently hailed as one of metal’s most charismatic live bands, Paradise Lost arrive in this new decade as veterans, legends and revered figureheads for several generations of gloomy metalheads. The band’s last two albums – The Plague Within (2015) and Medusa (2017) – saw a much celebrated return to brutal, old school thinking, via two crushing monoliths to slow-motion death and spiritual defeat. But not content with spawning an entire subgenre with early death/doom masterpiece Gothic nor with conquering the metal mainstream with the balls-out power of 1995’s Draconian Times, they have subsequently traversed multiple genre boundaries with skill and grace, evolving through the pitch-black alt-rock mastery of ’90s classics One Second and Host to the muscular but ornate grandeur of 2009’s Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us and Tragic Idol (2012), with the nonchalant finesse of grand masters. It’s a good time to be in Paradise Lost.”įormed in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1988, Paradise Lost were unlikely candidates for metal glory when they slithered from the shadows and infiltrated the UK underground.
But for me, I think about it more in terms of being relaxed and content.
“The last few albums have gone down well and we’ve gradually moved back up the festival bills. “We’re doing really well right now,” says guitarist and co-founder Greg Mackintosh. Powered by a lust for creativity and a stout devotion to haunting heaviness, Paradise Lost have defied the odds by coming back stronger than ever over the past decade. Obsidian… dark, reflective and black: it’s a pretty decent description of the music that Paradise Lost have been making over the last 32 years, even though this most resilient of British metal bands have stoically refused to be pinned down to one easily defined formula.
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