2000 Underworld - Everything, Everything
2001 Silverbullit - Citizen Bird
2002 Circle - Alotus
2003 José Gonzáles - Veneer
2004 Silverbullit - Arc Light
2005 Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal
2006 Ben Frost - Theory of Machines
2007 Anna Ternheim - Leaving On A Mayday
2008 Meshuggah - ObZen
2009 Maserati - Passages
2010 Killing Joke - Absolute Dissent
2011 Kreng - Grimoire
2012 Swans - The Seer
2013 Klaus Schultze - Shadowlands
2014 Gnod - The Somnambulist’s Tale
2015 Everything Everything - Get To Heaven
2016 Swans - The Glowing Man
2017 King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
2018 Scars On Broadway - Dictator
2019 Tool - Fear Inoculum
2020 Paradise Lost - Obsidian2021 Carbon Based Lifeforms - Stochastic
2022 Final - It Comes to Us All
2023 Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex
2024 Everything Everything - Mountainhead
Along with bands such as
Anathema and
My Dying Bride,
Paradise Lost are considered pioneers in the genre of death-doom metal (an offspring of traditional doom metal and goth rock, both of which gained a firm foothold in the 1980s). While My Dying Bride more or less uncompromisingly clung to the heavy rock wall of death-doom metal, Paradise Lost already deviated with their fourth album
Icon (1993) in a search for more experimental soundscapes and flirted wildly with the British synthpop tradition. After a handful of lost records, the more expressive, dark and heavier compositions gradually crept onto the releases and with
Plague Within (2015) the band regained their place in the driver's seat. Before the recording of
Medusa (2017), Finnish drummer
Waltteri Väyrynen jumped on board as the band's sixth drummer in order. Otherwise, the member list has actually been kept intact since the start in 1988 and when you hear Väyrynen's contribution, there is probably no reason to believe that the drum stool will be replaced in the first place.
Obsidian is Paradise Lost's sixteenth studio album since the debut Lost Paradise (1990) and it does not seem far-fetched to state that vocalist Nick Holmes's work in the Swedish old school death metal band Bloodbath has greatly contributed to Paradise Lost's return and to some extent updated their sound. The traditional growl parts are back, which have obviously been upgraded and refined, and so are composer/guitarist Gregor Mackintosch's peculiar and twisted beautiful guitar leads. The arrangements, on an initial listen, almost slavishly and possibly boringly, follow the traditional template for how striking songs should be built and could easily remain so if it were not for the slightly kaleidoscopic and perhaps even fractal guitar riffs that can be discovered with each new listen. On Obsidian, Paradise Lost fills the funnel with a mixture of styles and creates a completely new one of their own. A bit of Sisters of Mercy, a bit of Depeche Mode, a bit of traditional heavy metal and voila, new take on death-doom.
