GAEREA put clean singing on their black metal record and didn’t flinch. That’s the first thing worth knowing about Loss, the Portuguese collective’s fifth album and their Century Media debut. Not clean singing as a tasteful accent, the kind bands deploy to soften a hard edge without committing to it. Actual melodic vocal lines. Choruses you can follow. A closer, Stardust, that opens with piano and doesn’t apologize for it.
Whether that sounds like progress or capitulation depends on what you came for. If you arrived via Limbo or Mirage expecting the same blackened suffocation, Loss will disorient you. Give it thirty minutes anyway.
The record was made in early 2025 in Porto with longtime collaborator Miguel Teroso, and something in the production reflects a band who’ve stopped second-guessing themselves. Luminary opens without preamble: thick riffing, a driving double-kick workout, controlled power that doesn’t need to arrive loud to feel heavy. The melodic passages aren’t decorations. They’re structural. The song shifts between crushing and anthemic, and the blast-beat surge near the end hits harder for everything that preceded it.
Hellbound swings between ferocious and hypnotic, blast beats giving way to droning, layered synths sitting underneath the noise like a low current. There’s a chorus that lands with real weight, not because it’s massive in production terms, but because the song has built toward it honestly. The harshest impulses and the melodic ones don’t fight each other here. They just coexist, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.
The anonymous vocalist is doing something different on this record. The approach is more expansive, roaring where earlier work tended toward anguish, capable of carrying a melody without abandoning the raw edges. On Submerged, the interplay between clean passages and full-throttle aggression gives the track its emotional centre. A mid-song drop to piano and clean guitar resets the tension, and the track builds back toward something genuinely affecting before cutting out.
Phoenix and Nomad lean hardest into the record’s anthemic instincts, and Nomad in particular has a chanted passage that feels built for open-air stages. GAEREA have always had a ritualistic quality to their live presence, masked and deliberate, and these songs read like they were written with festival fields somewhere in mind. Nomad earns it; there’s a brooding undertow that keeps the chorus from feeling like the whole point.
LBRNTH sits between the album’s two closing tracks as a brief electronic interlude, atmospheric and slightly detached from the surrounding material. It functions as a reset, and it works.
Stardust closes everything with piano, whispered voices, clean melody, and then the drop into blast beats. The shift lands because the song has spent four minutes earning it, and by that point Loss has extended enough goodwill to make the lurching dynamic feel like release.
The masks stay on. The record is about grief and guilt and buried things, worn on the surface without turning into aesthetic posture. The black metal infrastructure is still underneath all of it, holding the weight.
Loss will be released on 20 March 2026 via Century Media Records.
Live photo – Steve Gerrard
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