Review by Saxy S for Gaerea - Loss (2026)

The transition for Gaerea from Season of Mist to Century Media Records has become a tumultuous one. The melodic black metal band who had previously released two high quality albums (Mirage and Coma) have done away with a significant portion of what made those albums so special and replaced them with mostly watered down melodic metalcore trends. Now Century Media Records does have a strong class of artists who release music under their label, but not many of them can be truly categorized as black metal. But it does seem like that has been changing in the last couple of years. In fact, the band who Gaerea beat out for this review spot, Blessings and Curses by Non Est Deus, are also signed to Century Media Records! But calling Gaerea exclusively black metal is a disservice to the band. Their last two albums had a lot of progressive and post-metal elements infused, which made them stand out, and that's before you start with the obvious melodic death metal hybrid.

Now on Loss, Gaerea have decided to turn down the black metal from before and make it more accessible. The death metal influence that was previous before has taken center stage and could even be debated that their sound has moved closer to that of the heavier melodic metalcore bands like Bleed From Within. And with that comes clean vocals... and they don't sound very good at all. Clean singing has its place in metal music, even extreme metal music, but more often than not, these modern bands try to replicate the Chester Bennington pitched singing with a rasp and it sounds terrible. Chester could do it well for two reasons: the first was these singing moments were usually the apex of the song dynamically. The second was that most of the time, he sung in a hushed, clean timbre without rasp and they would be more impactful. Part of the reason why "Stardust" works is because the vocals enter over a hushed, Sleep Token-esque electronic backdrop, then after a while, the band enters and crushes the listener with blast beats and tremolo picking guitars and powerful vocals. There is strong variety here and the quasi scream/sing chorus becomes more impactful.

Unfortunately this is not the case for the rest of the album. Once the listener has an idea as to what Loss is going to sound like after the first two tracks, the listener can turn their brain off and let the atmosphere take them away. They might be surprised by a clean guitar break during a songs interlude, but they can also be assured that the volume and monotone vocals will return momentarily. And this happens every time! From "Cyclone" to " Nomad" and "Phoenix", you would be hard-pressed to name one distinct feature between the three. I think the most disappointing aspect of Loss is that, structurally, it sounds solid. But the execution is so severely lacking and I don't know whether to blame the band themselves, or Century Media, which have lost a lot of favour with me in the past three years (see my Orbit Culture Death Above Life review).

Best Songs: Submerged, Stardust

For Fans Of: Bleed From Within, Harakiri for the Sky, Groza