D.U. isn’t trying to sound like a death metal elitist, but we haven’t kept up with Amorphis since the Elegy album and My Kantele EP after that back in the late 1990s. So it’s good to catch up and check out the upcoming new album Halo.
We know enough about latter-day Amorphis to know that the album sounds like it’s in the direction the last several albums have taken, with prog rock mixed with soaring, a bit melancholic metal, keyboards, and vocals, paired with solid death metal vocals.
There’s some guest additional vocals on the record as well, most prominently on the album closer, the ballad “My Name is Night.”
The Finnish band has released a new video for the album, “The Moon.” Watch it below, and there’s lyrics for the track at the YouTube link.
As we can see, the video is really pro as we would expect from a band of Amorphis’s stature, but it suffers from a common problem with music videos that include a narrative: how to blend the band playing with the storyline. It seems like most music video directors don’t have an effective way to approach this and so just randomly cut between the band performance and the plot, as is the case with “The Moon.”
All that aside, “The Moon” is a good representation of what Halo sounds like. Amorphis fans should be satisfied with the album and its mythological lyrical themes, and newcomers that like keys, electric guitars, and clean and death metal vocals churning in a Nordic cauldron should be ready to lean over the barrier in front of the stage and headbang to Halo too.
Halo is coming out on February 11, 2022 on Atomic Fire Records. Preorders are up now for digital, LP, box set, and digipack.
Photo: Sam Jamsen
