I came to Cult of Luna late. The upside was a decade of records to work through in a few months. The downside turned up afterwards, once I had counted the tours I had missed, and it has not gone away: ten albums in, I have never seen this band play a note in person. In the Shadow of Your Shadow is only the second of their records I have met on release day.
It opens on a wheezing organ and tape hiss, then the title track settles on a riff and repeats it. And repeats it. Seven and a half minutes of slow mass, the drums stately under it, synths hanging in the gaps like something off a science fiction soundtrack, closer in feel to Godflesh than to anything on A Dawn to Fear. Hypnotic and bludgeoning at once, which is harder than it sounds. Repetition at this tempo usually becomes a waiting game. Here it does not, because the phrasing keeps shifting under the weight, because a clean melodic guitar runs against the punishment and gives the whole thing something to balance on, and because the band hold the title back until the bridge.
The guitars are dirtier than anything this band have put on record in a decade, and Johannes Persson has coarsened his voice to match. Where The Long Road North sanded its edges, this one leaves them where they landed. There is a cost. No saxophone, no obvious new toy, nothing to point at the way Vertikal had its machines or Mariner had Julie Christmas. What there is instead is weight, applied carefully, and a band that sounds like it is playing in a room rather than a cathedral.
A sinister way to open a record, given what Persson says it is about. He has described the album as written through the eyes of “the traitor within,” a part of himself he had assumed was finished. “A battle once fought and believed to be won. A conviction that this venomous part of yourself had been buried so deep it could never return. But it was always there, hidden in the cracks of the persona. Silent. Patient. Waiting for the right moment to emerge once again.”
That is a more exposed premise than this band usually work from. Their records have been built around cities, silent film, the cold of space. Here the frame is a man in Umeå, twenty-eight years past the hardcore band Eclipse, working out that the past has not finished with him.
It is their tenth album, released on their own Red Crk label, which has handled the band since The Raging River in 2021, and Persson has been making the same argument about repetition for a quarter of a century. “Stagnation is the only thing that scares me,” he says. “I don’t care whether or not people think we’re repeating ourselves.”
Sadness Will Reign sets the bar for everything after it. Joe Duplantier sings rather than growls, his clean voice riding above Persson’s rasp, and the two of them find a hazy melody that neither would reach alone. The middle section slows until the guitars are only holding the room open, and the scale of it stops being a question of volume. Twelve minutes would have been too much. Four minutes forty-seven, the shortest full song here, is exactly right.
Landby is barely a song. A classical guitar figure, keyboard drones wavering over the top, no drums worth mentioning. It works as a setup rather than a breather, and what it sets up is Breach.
Twelve minutes of the band doing the thing they do better than anyone. Breach accumulates. A figure with a slide-guitar twang to it, a second guitar, the second kit, synths creeping over the twang until it is gone, each element arriving without anything being taken away, until the last two minutes open into the heaviest passage on the record. The patience is what matters. It refuses the early peak and holds the barrage back until you have stopped expecting it. On Mariner that job belonged to The Wreck of the S.S. Needle, and this one carries it the same way, from the middle of the record outward.
Then The Rift takes the roof off. The fastest thing they have recorded, close to hardcore, both kits going at once while the guitars struggle to keep pace. Even here the band will not sit still. The middle section drops away and the vocals sound like they are being screamed into a cave, then the whole thing returns as the kind of riff that opens a circle pit the second they play it live, which is something I will have to take on trust.
A Way Back is the one that will divide people. Fredrik Kihlberg takes the lead vocal, and after twenty minutes of screaming, a clean voice arriving with the guitars soft behind it feels like the record exhaling. Dark folk, more or less, with a melody that opens upward while the rhythm section holds still. Kihlberg describes the song as being about “a way back to yourself, to a safe space, or simply finding a way to make it through when anxiety overwhelms you.” Anxiety has always been the unspoken companion to this band’s writing. Hearing it named that plainly is a different thing. It also sets a trap, because what follows does not stay soft.
One More Day is one of the best songs here with the worst thing on it. David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand arrives with a theatrical baritone and the song loses its momentum on contact. It plays like an Interpol feature turning up halfway through a Gojira song. The admiration behind the booking is real and long standing. Persson has said Edwards’ voice “fits perfectly on the song and it carries the subject matter with conviction,” and that is close to the trouble. The song was moving. Now it stands still being sincere at us for a while, and twelve minutes is a long stretch to spend waiting for the band to start again.
From Grey to Black pulls it back. A lurching riff, Persson at his rawest, quiet pastoral stretches that get run over at full speed, the band with no guest and nothing to prove. Then Burial, twelve minutes, and the most interesting idea here. An unhinged guitar solo turns up early, a faster melodic one around the three-minute mark, and the riffs underneath them are as good as any this band have written. Persson has talked about death without any drama at all. He grew up in a religious household, no longer believes, and reckons whatever comes after is probably what came before. “I’ve always had a non-dramatic relationship with death.”
Closing an album this consumed by things that will not stay buried with a song called Burial is either a joke or a small act of acceptance. Either way, the last four minutes are the loudest the record gets, and the band leave without explaining themselves.
Montreal has had its turns: Café Campus with Kylesa in 2015, the Corona with Julie Christmas and the full Mariner set the year after. I will find out eventually, in a room, and probably later than everyone else.
In the Shadow of Your Shadow is out today via Red Crk Recordings.
The In the Shadow of Your Shadow tour runs through Europe from 26 February to 13 March 2027, with no North American shows announced yet.
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