Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost embarked on their adventure in 1988 in the town of Halifax when they were barely out of secondary school. The band’s original line-up consisted of Nick Holmes, Greg Mackintosh, Aaron Aedy, Stephen Edmondson, and Matt Archer. Archer kicked around with the band only for a couple of years – as will become a pattern for the musicians behind the band’s drum kit – but the remaining four have stuck together from the very beginning.

The band started out with a few demos, which, despite their makeshift character, were a complete novelty at the extreme scene. When all the other death metal bands on the block were speeding off the rails, the Brits turned up the doom stomping and injected it with the death metal putrescence. They continued in this direction with their debut album “Lost Paradise”, released in 1990. The record caused quite the stir in the European underground (though not solely there) and has since been cited as a source of inspiration by, among others, Autopsy’s Chris Reifert and Immolation’s Ross Dolan. The band, however, made hay while the sun shone and a year later, they returned with the ground-breaking “Gothic”. Though keeping with the death-doom gloominess, the material saw the band explore the pathways of gothic rock and post-punk. The album was revolutionary and sired a new genre – gothic metal. Despite all that, the band did not follow this path for their subsequent album. Released in 1992, Shades of God is classic doom metal with robust structures and sees Holms diverge from the typical growl. The record boosted the band’s popularity, but the best was yet to come. The 1993 “Icon”, still very much full of doom but brimming with hard rock and punchiness, launched the five friends straight into the arms of big clubs, big venues and… MTV’s permanent scheduling! It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call them the bonafide rockstars of the Old Continent – and their status only grew when two years later, they released “Draconian Times”. The band’s fifth full-length record, which saw the band fully embrace the goth metal identity, was a hit straight out of the gate, selling around a million copies.

They wouldn’t be Paradise Lost, however, if they didn’t cock a snook at their fans. In 1997, they released One Second, a collection of songs that drew heavily from rock and pop, and almost immediately put some distance between them and the metal world. Despite performing well commercially, the record had a mixed reception, but the real rupture came later. In 1999, the band released into the world their most controversial record yet, Host – an album drenched in synth-pop and darkwave, where even the rock element is only doing background work. Staying on the experimental course, the follow-up Believe in Nothing and Symbol of Life boasted far more guitar parts than the two predecessors, but they were still only metal-adjacent. The proper return to heaviness came in 2005 with their self-titled album. Since then, the band has remained true to their roots, with albums such as The Plague Within, Medusa and Obsidian proving their fidelity to their trademark gothic metal with occasional flirtations with their death-doom beginnings. Currently, Paradise Lost is working on a new record, a follow-up to the 2020 “Obsidian”.