Hey, have you heard this new band, Gaerea?
There are few things I enjoy more than when a band becomes divisive. I like to stand at a distance and watch it all burn. Except the distance is in my head camouflaged as confusion, as I rarely know what I think about something before I see it written down, which makes me an unreliable narrator and a questionable writer.
For those eluded by the subtle humour, Gaerea are not a new band. They’ve been wading through the murky waters of extreme and modern post black metal for the better part of ten years, and with every album they’ve incrementally tightened the focus until they’ve arrived at Loss, their fifth record, out on Century Media on March 20th. Loss feels like a conscious expansion for a band that have always been well received, well reviewed, and well regarded, the holy trifecta of underground credibility. Having built their following among people deeply rooted in the confines of a certain niche, there are tensions here, aesthetic expectations, unwritten contracts, the anxiety of hearing something you love starting to sound like it might leave you behind. These concerns sharpened around Coma, their previous album, where clean vocals started nudging their sound towards a softer direction. We all know how it goes. But here’s the thing: Gaerea are no Architects. The latter rewrote their identity to reach a wider audience. This is a choice, and not an ignoble one. Gaerea are doing something harder to articulate: they are taking what was already there and stretching it, pulling the form tight until something that sounds accessible still feels genuine and uncompromised. This distinction is doing the work.
Loss opens with ‘Luminary’, which is not the immediate wall of sound one might expect. There are blast beats, yes, interspersed throughout, but there is also an anthemic chorus that briefly places us into metalcore territory. There are keys. There are whispered lyrics. And then I start singing along. This is catchy in a way that still sounds unmistakably Gaerea, which, in the context of their previous albums, is a remarkable feat. By the end of the track, you understand that something has shifted, though the direction in which things are moving is unclear. If this is a declaration, it’s a cryptic one.
What becomes clear however is that this is not a reinvention as such. Tremolo guitars are still present. Drums can still level a room when they need to. The DNA is there. What has changed is the focus, the sense that chaos has been traded for precision. The production is crisp, and entirely their own doing. Working with longtime collaborator Miguel Tereso at Demigod Recordings means the clarity you’re hearing is not a shiny new label compromise, but a conscious decision, and what that reveals is songwriting that is dynamic, immersive, and yes, occasionally impossible to resist moving to. The vocals are further forward in the mix than you might be used to, which is new, and it turns out it matters, as they’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Whether this trades too much heaviness for accessibility is probably where the arguments will start, and I will not sit here with headphones in my ears pretending they are entirely without merit.
From Mirage onwards, Gaerea have been incorporating more melodic riffs, and on Loss, that instinct is peaking. ‘Hellbound’ hits with a wall of sound and you know, you absolutely know, that bodies will be flying in that moshpit. There’s something Deafheaven-adjacent in the guitars, while drums carry the melody into the chorus before everything unfurls into chaos again, and this, as it turns out, is the formula. Mayhem, then breathing room. Aggression, then groove. It works because neither side compromises the other. This is what it sounds like when a band leaves the rage room and starts deciding where to place emotion. And then ‘Cyclone’ sort of opens like Sleep Token‘s ‘Take me back to Eden’ and I am, unashamedly, completely here for it. While I suspect this is precisely what will be upsetting the naysayers, here is what I keep coming back to: this no longer feels like a band singing from behind a mask. Sure, visually, the masks are still there, but aurally, they’ve fallen. A different voice has been pushing through for a while now, and on this record it finally comes into itself.
One reservation, and I want to stress that I’ve interrogated this thoroughly and concluded it’s probably another me problem, is ‘LBRNTH’. Each track breathes aplenty, and I am less convinced the album needed an entire interlude to prove a point. It sits before the final two songs, one of which is already in a lighter register, and it reminds me, let me just say it, quite a lot of Bring me the Horizon. I understand what it is doing, softening the ground before ‘Nomad’ starts with what could be a jarring shift in sound. I get this. Gaerea have done a lot more abrupt things in the past and survived them. But I also recognise that I opened this review by admitting I don’t know what I think until I write it down, and having now written it down, I am still not entirely sure. Make of that what you will.
What I do know is this: Loss is an honest album, albeit less dangerous. Instead of spilling out, emotion is being shaped, and whether this constitutes testing mainstream waters or growth is a question I will leave to people more certain of themselves. The band put it better than I could anyway: “Why would we play into the façade of being a very aggressive band with our feet on the monitors when we can just dance?”. I think that’s what it comes down to, really. Where Coma built a bridge, Loss is the other side. You can still see where it comes from, if you look back, and some may set it alight, as they do. But I’ve been singing along and smiling from this distance, and I know full well that you can’t dance to something when you’re too busy grieving.