Obsidian… dark, reflective and black: it’s a pretty decent description of the music that Paradise Lost have been making over the last 36 years, even though this most resilient of British metal bands have stoically refused to be pinned down to one easily defined formula. Powered by a lust for creativity and a stout devotion to haunting heaviness, Paradise Lost have defied the odds by coming back stronger than ever over the past decade.

“We’re doing really well right now,” says guitarist and co-founder Greg Mackintosh. “The last few albums have gone down well and we’ve gradually moved back up the festival bills. But for me, I think about it more in terms of being relaxed and content. It’s a good time to be in Paradise Lost.”

Formed in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1988, Paradise Lost were unlikely candidates for metal glory when they slithered from the shadows and infiltrated the UK underground. But not content with spawning an entire subgenre with early death/doom masterpiece Gothic nor with conquering the metal mainstream with the balls-out power of 1995’s Draconian Times, they have subsequently traversed multiple genre boundaries with skill and grace, evolving through the pitch-black alt-rock mastery of ’90s classics One Second and Host to the muscular but ornate grandeur of 2009’s Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us and Tragic Idol (2012), with the nonchalant finesse of grand masters. The band’s last two albums – The Plague Within (2015) and Medusa (2017) – saw a much celebrated return to brutal, old school thinking, via two crushing monoliths to slow-motion death and spiritual defeat. Consistently hailed as one of metal’s most charismatic live bands, Paradise Lost arrive in this new decade as veterans, legends and revered figureheads for several generations of gloomy metalheads. In keeping with their unerring refusal to deliver the expected, 2020 brings one of the band’s most diverse and devastating creations to date.