ALBUM REVIEW: Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration – Hooded Menace

Although they have a career spanning close to two decades, Finland’s HOODED MENACE have enjoyed a spike in notoriety in recent times. Largely, this is due to 2018’s excellent Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed and 2021’s stellar follow-up, The Tritonus Bell, cementing the band as a genuine heavyweight in death-doom. Now, four years later, comes album number seven, Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration, and it’s arguably the band’s magnum opus.
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Largely, this is due to the fact that Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration isn’t a bog-standard death-doom record that never moves into second gear. That crushing essence is still there of course, acting as the foundation of HOODED MENACE‘s weight as the skull crushing riffs in Pale Masquerade can attest to. However, throughout the album runs a clear influence for the flare and elegance of vintage 80s heavy metal. A trait first explored on their previous record, here, it feels like the band have embraced it into their DNA and the result is simply outstanding.

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Largely, this is due to the lengthy compositions that HOODED MENACE have created here. With additional runtime to truly breathe, what we are treated to is sublime epics, passages of music play that hit with such conviction it’s hard not to get swept up. Tracks like the aforementioned Pale Masquerade and Portrait Without A Face are prime examples of this, with the latter demonstrating expert musicianship from band leader Lasse Pyykkö, whose playing consistently impresses, and the additional cello provided by former bassist Antti Poutanen is a subtle but incredibly effective play.
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Additionally, the way in which the band cleverly utilise dynamic pace changes, moments where Pyykkö unleashes the shackles and drops killer riff after killer riff and the accompanying chaos that follows is world class. Lugubrious Dance – arguably one of the album’s highlights – contorts and evolves over its near seven and a half runtime, offering passages that crawls at glacial pace before unleashing a vintage heavy metal assault full of killer headbangable riffs and slick solo work that just speaks to the heart of what it means to be a heavy metal fan. Such is clear with the surprise and eyebrow raising cover of DURAN DURAN‘s Save a Prayer. On paper, this should be a steaming bag of crap and has every recipe for a weird misfire, but it’s arguably one of the finest moments on the record as HOODED MANCE deliver a reinvented goth masterclass in one of the album’s biggest highs. It’s lightning in the bottle moments like these that helps elevate Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration, and indeed HOODED MENACE, into stratospheric heights.


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And for all its heavy metal pomp and flare, HOODED MENACE still know how to sound utterly ferocious. Harri Kuokkanen delivers a career-defining performance here, his gutturals punchy and able to cut through the noise like a hot knife through butter. They keep you grounded as mourning riffs cascade in over the growls in epic finale Into Haunted Oblivion, or lending their weight to make a slick passage of play all the more cool as hell in Pale Masquerade. The delivery is spot on, elevated by a superb mix and production job.

With Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration, HOODED MENACE have delivered an outstanding heavy metal record. Establishing their death-doom traits as a bedrock allowing for their more creative muscles to flex is a move that has paid dividends. Jam-packed full of hooks and memorable moments, and devastatingly heavy, Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration is HOODED MENACE at the top of their game.

Rating: 9/10


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Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration is out now via Season Of Mist.

Follow HOODED MENACE on Instagram.

Thundermother sign with Napalm Records

Photo Credit: Jenny Lund


Swedish rock’n’roll powerhouse THUNDERMOTHER have signed a worldwide record deal with Napalm Records!



Founded in 2009 by guitarist Filippa Nässil, the band is renowned for their electrifying rock anthems and relentless touring, with highlights including supporting SCORPIONS across North America and Europe, performing on the KISS Kruise, and appearing at major festivals such as Wacken Open Air. Earlier this year, the band unleashed their sixth album Dirty & Divine, their first with the new lineup featuring Filippa Nässil, vocalist Linnéa Vikström Egg, returning bassist Majsan Lindberg, and drummer Joan Massing.



Now, they are ready to take this new era to the next level by joining forces with Napalm Records. Speaking about the signing, guitarist and founder Filippa Nässil says, “Napalm wanted to sign us for a long time, but we were under another contract. Now it feels really good to finally join them, because they’ve shown us they have the fire. They share strong visions like we do. We already started working on the next release and we’re stoked!”

Napalm Records Managing Director Thomas Caser adds, “we are thrilled to welcome THUNDERMOTHER to the Napalm Records family! The band represents pure, high-energy rock’n’roll like few others, and we can’t wait to open the next chapter of their success story together.”

For more information on THUNDERMOTHER like their official page on Facebook.

iron maiden : Somewhere In Time (1986)

Somewhere In Time was Iron Maiden’s ultimate overdog challenge, where expectations of excellence had to be met. The classic line-up faced their fans and critics in a situation of success and stability unlike any they had ever known, and now they had to prove themselves.

Somewhere In Time
Produced by Martin “Masa” Birch
Released 29 September 1986

1986. The world was at Iron Maiden’s feet. The double whammy of Powerslave (1984) and Live After Death (1985) had seen Maiden conquer the globe, including the notoriously diffcult-to-break North American market. The World Slavery Tour in 1984-85 had been a gruelling triumph, and the Live After Death concert album was Maiden’s third consecutive platinum seller in the US.

Click here for the making of Powerslave and the dizzying tale of Maiden’s five-year plan to become big in America!

What Iron Maiden achieved in the mid-80s is still the stuff of legend for up-and-coming bands, and it’s also the shadow that Maiden themselves stood in when they set out to forge their path in the late 1980s.


Eddie looks into the future of Iron Maiden.

Steve Harris might have felt great pressure at other crucial points in Maiden’s recording career. There had been the previous challenge of creating The Number Of The Beast (1982) with new arrival Bruce Dickinson, and there would be the later challenge of doing The X Factor (1995) when Dickinson had left. But their situation in 1986 was unique: Maiden’s line-up was stable and they had to deliver when everyone expected them to succeed. This is very different from feeling pressure to deliver when everyone expects you to fail.

Which makes the 1986 album all the more impressive.

Everyone even remotely interested in metal music was waiting for what the biggest metal band of the mid-1980s would come up with next, and it’s been heavily publicized that Bruce Dickinson had envisioned a drastic departure in style that the rest of the band and their producer Martin Birch rejected out of hand. What we got instead was Somewhere In Time, a classic Maiden-sounding album that clearly built on its predecessors but still sported some new and surprising elements.


Time travel! Maiden riding high in 1986.

The biggest change is immediately apparent: Synthesizers! Dickinson famously stated a couple of years earlier that you «can’t play heavy metal with synthesizers», but that is exactly what his own band does when they launch into Caught Somewhere In Time. The track is lengthy, among Maiden openers possibly most comparable to Where Eagles Dare on Piece Of Mind (1983), and relying heavily on guitarists Adrian Smith and Dave Murray to weave soundscapes around the simplistic chord patterns.

To a large extent, this is Adrian Smith’s album, his playing and writing taking center stage like never before, exemplified by the excellent and uplifting first single Wasted Years:


Indeed, without any songwriting contributions from Dickinson, who had all his semi-acoustic songs ditched, a heavier burden rests on Smith’s shoulders to come up with both music and lyrics. In addition to Wasted Years, which is surely one of Maiden’s most commercially inclined tracks, he also delivers the metallic Sea Of Madness, featuring one of the greatest Maiden guitar solos ever, and the brooding and groovy second single Stranger In A Strange Land.


Eddie on his way through space and time, searching for those wasted years.

At the same time, Birch’s production is far removed from the bare-bones aesthetic of the previous couple of studio albums, and the more lush and layered sound sits well with the new songs. Somewhere In Time was crafted at Compass Point Studios in Nassau and Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum in the first half of 1986, and it was the longest-gestating and most expensive Maiden production to that point.

In many ways the effort to modernize Maiden’s sound paid off. The droning synthesizers are certainly a sign of the times, but they also suit the material. Somewhere In Time has a unique identity in the Maiden catalog and enjoys a great deal of love from Maiden fans, as guest writer Pål Ødegård elaborates on in this essay.


Iron Maiden’s classic line-up photographed by Aaron Rapaport as they get ready for the release of Somewhere In Time, their 1986 “synthesizer album”: Dave Murray, Nicko McBrain, Steve Harris, Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith.

On the other hand, some of the material might have fallen through if it wasn’t for Birch’s skills with the knobs and faders. Heaven Can Wait is strictly filler in this reviewer’s opinion, despite the middle section that features the first (and best) of Maiden’s many football stadium chants. The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner is also rather middle-of-the-road as a composition, but the tasteful guitar work from Murray and Smith, as well as the frenetic pace of Nicko McBrain’s drumming, elevates it to the type of Maiden song you always enjoy hearing again.

Deja-Vu, a Murray composition with lyrics and melodies by Harris, is a liberating burst of short and sweet Maiden metal. It is not as memorable as previous rockers like Aces High or The Trooper, but it is certainly of a type that fans of the band would come to miss in later years.


The Somewhere In Time show on tour in 1986-87.

By this point one had come to expect the closing track of a new Maiden album to be the patented Harris epic. There had been Hallowed Be Thy Name, To Tame A Land and most memorably Powerslave‘s inimitable Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. On Somewhere In Time the epic tradition continues with Alexander The Great.




It does struggle to live up to the immense legacy of the previous Harris epics, closing the record on a fine if somewhat diluted note, but this has more to do with the standard that the band has by now established for themselves. In short, Maiden have made themselves hard to beat.

Bruce Dickinson had written great things for Maiden before, and despite being a no-show in the songwriting here he would do so again. In a similar way Harris’ material for Somewhere In Time, while certainly good, would be bested by his efforts for the next Maiden album.

Click here for a review of Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988)!

The theme of the Somewhere In Time album, as the song titles imply, is loosely tied together by most of the lyrics relating to travelling, space and time. With that starting point, long-time illustrator Derek Riggs delivers a truly classic sleeve that really makes vinyl worth it:



The current black vinyl reissue is faithful to the original packaging, but the Somewhere In Time concept, lyrics and artworks lend themselves to the gatefold treatment, and the 2013 picture disc takes advantage of this. The gatefold opens to reveal shots of the band on and off stage in 1986-87.

But just when you thought the picture disc reissues were going to nail the actual pictures (unlike the notoriously period-confusing 1998 CD remasters), here comes the first fuck-up with a shot from the wrong tour in the bottom left corner. And the once celebrated Maiden quality control takes another nosedive with the new black vinyl edition, where the stereo channels are flipped into playing Murray on the right and Smith on the left…

Anyway, on with the good stuff, the picture disc itself is adorned with Riggs’ Wasted Years and Stranger In A Strange Land illustrations, the latter of which cleverly continues the tale of the album cover:



Taken as part 3 of an artwork trilogy that began with the Wasted Years single and continued with the album cover, also spinning off with the Somewhere On Tour illustration, this is Maiden and Riggs at the height of their visual storytelling, an embellishment of the music that inspired countless young bands in the 1980s.


In sum, Somewhere In Time is an album that’s very sophisticated as a concept and a production, but a little less compelling as a collection of songs. Some are strong, chiefly the excellent Smith entries, while Harris’ tracks disappoint slightly in light of what he delivered on Piece Of Mind and Powerslave.

INTRODUCING: Cwfen

With a gleam of enthusiasm in the eye. Agnes, holds up a phone to the camera of the zoom meeting. “Just look at all these!” She exclaims before scrolling, seemingly endlessly through a litany of names. All of which potentials for what would eventually become the final agreed upon name, CWFEN. What began as a light hearted question about how many times they’ve been asked on the exact pronunciation, (it’s ‘coven’) has turned into a rabbit hole of a discussion about what’s in a name, but also highlights just how much care and attention the quartet put into their work.



Agnes Alder – vocals, rhythm guitar and Guy DeNuit – Backing vocals, lead guitar form half of the engaging powerhouse that is CWFEN and despite all of the passion and emotion they pour into the music are perfectly relaxed. At peace in their living room, conversing with a manner suiting two musicians who, while new to this project, are very familiar with the territory of the music industry.
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For those that have heard the current singles from debut Sorrows, the laid-back atmosphere that surrounds these two musicians seems at odds with the emotive weight and passion that comes through in their music. However, there is no sense of underestimating either the talent or experience contained within CWFEN. As Agnes explains when asked about the seeds of this project. “Both of us have been in bands and playing music for a very long time. Yet it had been a while since I had played live, I had been writing in secret for a while with no intention of anyone seeing it.”

With this outlet aspect, it’s clear that the soul of the music is a passion project and that fits with the intensity that they have subsequently weaved into their latest releases. However, the origins were not clear-cut metal in terms of genre identity. “I was doing some kind of electronic stuff initially,” is how Agnes describes the germination. Turning to Guy, “then I let you hear it.” Through nods of agreement and a knowing look. It appears that CWFEN may have originally been heading down a darkwave route. Discussing the first rehearsal and the preparation he went through with equipment, “I brought a lot of equipment. Synthesisers, drum triggers all set to get electronic, then I went away on tour with the band I was in.”
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“And I ruined it,” says Agnes with a chuckle. With no hesitation in agreeing, Guy confirms “yep, I get back you said right, ditch the synths we’re a metal band now I’ve written new demos.”
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From this point forward, the idea of what would become CWFEN formed very quickly. Rös Ranquinn was in place on drums. Guy says of him “he’s a long-time collaborator with myself. We go back to high school. So long term friends and playing together our adult lives.” The final piece of the CWFEN puzzle is bassist Mary Thomas Baker. Again, a previous collaborator of Guy‘s “Mary was at my birthday party and heard some of the demos and wanted to contribute. So, the three of us, Rös, Mary and I have all played in bands previously.”

With a group now assembled, with the added bonus of previous understanding of influences, playing styles and creative influence Guy continues, “the four of us got in a room, you brought in the seeds of ideas [gesturing to Agnes] and we got the ideas down quite quickly into what is heard now.”


From having fledging demos recorded, the next logical step for CWFEN was gigs. For four seasoned musicians live is where they can hone their collective sound and allow the preconceived ideas to flow. “Everything with this band happened really quickly, at that point we thought we should try and get some gigs,” Agnes explains before adding, “we had the demos down before we’d played live. What we found, quite quickly, after playing live is that we’re much, much heavier (than the demos). That has shaped the sound and made it’s way back into the style.” This is born out by the reworked versions of Embers and Bodies both of which were on those demo recordings and are now fully realised on Sorrows having been through this evolution process.

The organic nature of how CWFEN have come to be, is one of the clearest things that come through in their music. Even though Agnes undertook a hard pivot from an electronic idea into metal, many of the songs owe their origins to this singular outlet of creativity. The subsequent combination of working with friends who are all accomplished musicians within the field of metal has helped nurture the music. Agnes sums it up succinctly, “I had a clear vision initially with how I wanted these some of these songs to sound, the natural chemistry of playing with these really good friends has translated beautifully.” Adding with a shared laugh with Guy, “it’s surpassed all our modest expectations!”a

Royale Lynn: Finding Light In The Darkness

For somebody only now crossing over into rock and metal, Nashville singer-songwriter ROYALE LYNN is completely at home in the genre. With roots in country music, her alt-rock debut album Black Magic pushes her into an entirely new realm, and so far, she has been welcomed in. Her style is bold, unique and refined, and having already toured with bands such as ASKING ALEXANDRIA, SEETHER, and SKILLET, there’s no doubt she will be hugely successful.
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Catching up with her just before the album’s release, she explains. “This record is kind of like I am a snake, I’ve shed my old skin and this is who I am.” She tells us that having always listened to metal music, and looking up to heavier bands, it only makes sense that she makes this transition. She says, “I’m so glad to truly become the artist I feel I am meant to be, that’s why I’m genuinely so excited for people to hear who I am and what I have to say on this album.”



While ROYALE LYNN is still fairly new in writing alternative music, it’s almost impossible to tell when listening to her debut. As a concept album, Black Magic tells the story of Pandora’s Box, with each song representing an evil that has escaped, and discusses a mental health struggle that she has faced herself. Combining strong visuals and a powerful vulnerability, the album takes listeners on a journey, where by the end, they should feel much closer to the artist. She explains, “I think that everybody will have their own perspective of what each song means for them, but for me it was healing just to write out all of these raw and vulnerable emotions. Watching every single part of my brain come out into this project is super cool.”
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A common misconception with concept albums is that listeners can feel disconnected from the artist, and where a wider story is definitely told, this album is so deeply personal in it’s lyrics, told through the vulnerability in her vocals. “Writing music is how I process. If I’m honest and open, maybe someone else out there can be honest and open about their feelings as well. If I need to talk about my feelings to get people out there to also talk about their feelings and their struggles, then I’ve done my job.”
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In many ways, the album is dark and dramatic, but there is so much hope and light woven throughout. ROYALE LYNN explains that while there is a lot of darkness to her personality, it wouldn’t make sense to have this be the overarching theme, considering how in her daily life, she is always encouraging the people around her to find some hope. She refers to the small positive moments in life as ‘little glimmers’, and asks her friends what their glimmer of the day was. She sees this as the way out of the darkness and hard times, finding more and more small moments of joy until they outweigh the bad. Naturally, this comes through in the album. She says, “it’s really cool to be able to guide people through a dark time and show them that there is going to be light at the end of the tunnel, you got to wait it out, figure out how to find it.” Recently, it seems as though bands have been fighting against the assumption that metal music is depressing and negative, and this album only compounds that. By acknowledging the difficult times and not sugar coating it, ROYALE LYNN is able to focus on the good. “Taking care of your mental health is so important, and music heals in that way ‘cause it makes you feel less alone. There’s moments in the meet and greet lines that truly mean the world to me, where people tell me of their struggles. It means a lot to me that people can come to our show and feel safe.”
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Although the music speaks for itself, a huge part of the appeal of ROYALE LYNN is her style and aesthetic. The image of the record is strong, but feminine, and really represents who she is as a person. “It’s important to me to show everybody who I was, and how much I’ve grown even as a woman in the last two years.” She is unafraid to tap into everything that inspires her, and more often than not, this is a 90s inspired glamour. As soon as she mentions that she is inspired by the SPICE GIRLS, her image makes a whole lot more sense, and she expresses the excitement of being able to live out wearing the clothes and looking the part of something that she always admired growing up. While of course, women in metal and alternative rock are huge inspirations to her, it is the style of pop and dance music that really comes through in her visuals.
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She jokes, “you should see my Pinterest board,” and it’s easy to imagine, with the 90s aesthetic combined with the aggression of metal style. Fundamentally, this crosses through into her sound, with influences of pop, dance and EDM throughout the album. “Every morning, I wake up and I go for a run. That’s when I’m listening to new music. Obviously, I’m keeping up with what’s happening in the metal, hard rock space, but I’m also listening to SABRINA CARPENTER and TATE MCRAE. I love when you’re able to appreciate upbeat music for what it is.”

For an album that has been a very long time coming, ROYALE LYNN is now just ready for it to be out in the world. “I’m just so excited for everyone to finally hear it. It’s raw, it’s real, it’s my feelings to a T and I just hope that it gives people strength out there. I hope it resonates with everyone, and they can hear of how dark it can really get, but know there is light.”

BLACK MAGIC is out now via Epitaph Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS122 here:

HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: The Final Frontier – Iron Maiden

2010 marked an interesting point in the career of British metal legends IRON MAIDEN. Vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith had re-joined the band to much fanfare over a decade before and the band had gone on to release three critically acclaimed albums with this new ‘super lineup’, long banishing the dark times that had come during their early-to-mid-90s era.



Fans were still a little wary though. Dickinson‘s first stint with the band had come to an end after 10 years, starting with 1982’s legendary album The Number Of The Beast and ending with the comparatively directionless Fear Of The Dark in 1992. Would the same rot start to set in this second time around? Would Dickinson‘s ambitions make him restless again after another 10 years with MAIDEN? Would the music start to half-heartedly retread old territory, like it had in the 90s? Further speculation arose during interviews in the lead up to the album’s release, with bassist Steve Harris saying he’d always imagined that the band would call it a day after 15 albums. The Final Frontier was to be their fifteenth album and, with a name like that, who could blame fans for wondering if this would be the band’s swansong?
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As it turned out, IRON MAIDEN still had a long way to go yet (as their current record-breaking Run For Your Lives world tour proves) but at the time fans really thought this could be the end. Thematically, the album only fuelled this idea, touching as it does on tales of apocalypse, failed exploration, reconciliation and returning home. Musically, it continued the more progressive approach to songwriting established on Brave New World, the Smith and Dickinson ‘comeback’ album released in 2000. Hardly any of the ten songs on offer here dip below the five minute mark and most of them follow a non-linear structure, building further on the album’s theme of exploration. Until 2015’s The Book Of Souls double album, The Final Frontier was actually IRON MAIDEN’s longest album, clocking in at an epic seventy six minutes. Production duties were once again handled by long-time collaborator Kevin Shirley so the album retained the huge sound of their previous three albums and in terms of popularity, it proved to be one of their biggest sellers yet, peaking at number one in the UK – their first chart-topping album since 1992’s Fear Of The Dark – and number four on the US Billboard top 200, their highest album chart position in America up to that point.


El Dorado was the only single made available before the album released, an aggressive and edgy-sounding song with knowing lyrical nods to the people who caused the financial crash of 2008 (“I’ve a clever banker’s face, with just a letter out of place”). It still has the classic galloping IRON MAIDEN bass and guitar riffs but everything sounds just a little more updated, thanks in part to Dickinson’s cutting vocal delivery (although some would argue that it’s a little rich when our multi-millionaire metal heroes start complaining about people having too much money). Other highlights from the album are a little more in keeping with the sci-fi cover artwork – the title track, Starblind and the emotive Coming Home all tell tales of adventurers trying to return home after exploring the galaxy, sometimes only to find that home is gone.

In places it’s a surprisingly emotional album, which isn’t something IRON MAIDEN are usually known for and in that respect it feels similar to 2021’s Senjutsu, which focuses largely on crumbling empires and battles lost long ago. It’s interesting to note, too, that this record features a real variety of songwriters, with Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson noticeably credited almost as often as band founder Steve Harris. Even guitarists Dave Murray and Janick Gers get a credit!

We Lost The Sea: Narrative Departures

Post-rock, by its very nature, seeks to create meaningful and unique emotional experiences for its listeners. Yet few albums reach such rarified popularity and devotion in the genre as Departure Songs by WE LOST THE SEA. Its reflection of noble sacrifices from history, alongside the personal tragedy of vocalist Chris Torpy‘s death in 2013 and a band in subsequent transition, created a brilliant alchemy that resonates among fans to this day. Ten years on, the Australian six-piece seek to commemorate the anniversary alongside the release of their fifth album, A Single Flower.



Guitarist Matt Harvey makes clear that this success was not expected – and that their first European tour in 2017 was when the band fully realised the impact on their fans. “People just wanted to share their stories with us, say how much it meant to them, how much it had helped them. For such a small band, from so far away, to come and have a massive impact on people’s lives across the world, was really special.”



Part of the appeal, beyond the music itself, was the level of detail and effort invested in the album’s narrative. Each song reflects a specific historical tragedy – the sacrifice of Captain Oates on A Gallant Gentleman, the Challenger space shuttle disaster on Challenger Part 1 and Part 2. It’s an approach now firmly embedded in the band’s DNA. “When we started to write the songs, I think that it was just a natural gravitation towards something that would make them make sense, or help us contextualise what we were going through,” says Harvey, who also creates the artwork for the band. “But I think we set that bar, and then it’s been a thing we’ve wanted to do ever since. The concepts of stories [are] now an extension of what we do as artists, as musicians, as the band.”

That approach parlayed its way into 2019’s Triumph & Disaster, whose concept was set out early by Harvey: “I was like, this is going to be about the end of the world. It’s the apocalypse.” It was a bold approach that caused some tension amongst the band, who struggled at first to lock into the concept. “Some of the guys found it quite restrictive… I was in the headspace of it and my writing style and my apocalyptic sound was already coming out and the guys were like, I’m not feeling this. Eventually they came around, and we pushed out something like [opening track] Towers, which is immense and amazing.”


The learnings from that process informed the approach to creating A Single Flower. First and foremost: a long production schedule, to accommodate families and jobs, and allow extended writing sessions for the band’s strong personalities to converge together. Also flipped was the approach to the narrative. “We experimented with doing it the opposite way… Let’s just write what we want, we’ll see what comes out. What we feel will eventually translate through our instruments.” Harvey worked closely with Mark Owen to form the themes for the album. “We sort of squash it down until it becomes something that we both want to do, we believe in, and we enjoy, but is respectful of each other’s input and makes sense as a whole.”

As such, the “elevator pitch” for A Single Flower is still a work in progress for Harvey. “What motivates life to live, to create beauty, to see beauty when there’s so much horror and bloodshed in the world, I guess? What is the cost of seeing a single flower, and is it worth the trade-off?” The title is drawn from Cormac McCarthy‘s All The Pretty Horses, one of many literary touchpoints for the album, with each of its six songs linked to a specific artist or writer’s quote. Album closer Blood Will Have Blood takes its title from Macbeth and best sums up the album’s theme of the debt we must pay. “Is there an equity that we owe the earth for the tragedy that has occurred, that we’ve caused, and when will we eventually pay the price for that?” Muses Harvey.



It’s a challenging theme that pays off with some of the band’s best work, from the pitch-perfect escalation and menace of If They Had Hearts to the emerging brightness and hope of Bloom. Single Everything Here Is Black And Blinding breaks new ground with electronic textures and an accompanying music video, a first for WE LOST THE SEA. It’s a culmination, too, of a true collaboration within the band. “There was an insistence on trying to make sure that it sounded like six people were playing and wrote it,” says Harvey. “We spent 95% of it writing in the same room together. Everybody wants to have their airtime with their bits. And I think everybody brought their A-game to this record.”

Alongside the new album comes a first-ever US tour, followed by two sets at their debut ArcTanGent Festival appearance in the UK. Both ArcTanGent and Post Festival in the US will feature Departure Songs played in full to mark its tenth anniversary. Having such a beloved record amongst fans can cast a long shadow over later work, and it’s clear that WE LOST THE SEA are keen to respect that love from the fans whilst foregrounding their newer material. “We never take it for granted. Every musician wants something like that,” admits Harvey of Departure Songs. “[But] I think after the anniversary this year we’re going to put it in the box, in the cupboard, for a while. Maybe ten years, I don’t know.” It’s a fair sentiment from a band with plenty more to say and share.

A Single Flower is out now via Dunk Records (Europe)/Bird’s Robe (Australia)/Translation Loss (USA)/New Noise (China). View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS122 here:


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We Lost The Sea announce new album ‘A Single Flower’

ALBUM REVIEW: A Single Flower – We Lost The Sea

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