The Portuguese black metal outfit Gaerea has spent the better part of a decade refining a formula built on contrast — serrated riffs against melodic hooks, intensity against restraint — and on “Loss” that formula has calcified into something harder and more deliberate. Nine tracks. No filler. A band with a clear sense of what it wants to destroy and what it wants to leave standing.
The opening track, “Luminary”, establishes the terms immediately. Guitar chugs and kick drums lock into a unison groove that is more physical and modern than atmospheric, and then the chorus arrives: slow, insistent, the kind of melody you carry home without meaning to. Right out of the box, Xi’s rhythmic modulations under the repeated choruses are one of the record’s quiet engineering achievements — small metric shifts that prevent the hooks from settling into comfort or boredom. Halfway through, the song stops. Piano and voice only, suspended above nothing. It feels like braking hard at the edge of a cliff. Then the chorus comes back and swirls you back in unfolded chaos. “Submerged” — one of the singles released ahead of the album as a warning of things to come — still lands like a first listen. The dynamics are surgical: long suspension, then detonation. The vocal approach in the chorus carries a low, deliberate power reminiscent of Joe Duplantier’s style at his most controlled. What the song does after that is more interesting: the mood shifts toward melodeath territory, with a melodic sensibility that recalls acts like Katatonia, before a clean vocal layer arrives that is harder to place until it isn’t — Axioma Ethica Odini-era Enslaved, unmistakably. After a few seconds of silence to catch your breath, “Hellbound” comes. It is the record’s angriest moment, and its most focused. The combination of clean and distorted guitars in the chorus shouldn’t work as cleanly as it does, and the post-chorus opens up progressively before the song folds back in on itself. “I wear my sins like a second skin” is a line that doesn’t need unpacking. It just sits there. The rule goes: if a record doesn’t grab you by the first three tracks, then it won’t. And this first triad of triumphs shows no mercy.
“Uncontrolled” leans towards a modern, lower-tuned, mid-tempo approach. “Phoenix” compensates with a wall of sound that the drums keep destabilising in interesting ways; it also shows one of the widest vocal ranges on the record, with a Katatonia-esque delivery in the verses that makes the chorus hit differently. “Cyclone” opens in a way that is unusual for Gaerea — a clean vocal passage, unhurried, with a spaciousness that calls to mind Paul Masvidal’s work with Cynic. It doesn’t last, though. The band returns to their architecture, but the guitar work here is among the most detailed on the record, with very tasteful guitar leads.
Then “LBRNTH” takes you by surprise. After thirty minutes of compression and release, the record simply opens a window. Lo-fi production, a female vocal that is close to angelic and hymnal, surrounded by electronics that owe something to both Radiohead and Leprous. It is the record’s most unexpected and boldest decision and, arguably, its most necessary one. “Nomad” gathers what’s left for one more push — high energy but with something elegiac underneath it, the sound of someone who keeps moving because stopping feels worse. Someone without a place to call home, physically and spiritually.
The closing track, “Stardust”, is the longest thing here and the most openly exploratory. Gaerea tests what seem to be uncharted waters, whether it’s via song structures, vocal styles, and/or melodic directions that don’t all point in the same direction. Then, at the end, a single line delivered as a roar: “Are you still with me?” It reads as a genuine question to all those who made it this far in such a journey.
“Loss” doesn’t reinvent Gaerea. What it does is clarify them further — their range, their control, and the particular kind of intensity they generate.
Gaerea is an agent which carries a nuclear heart — a core of tremendous potential and energy with an uncontrollable release which hasn’t cooled off. If anything, it’s more pressurised.
“Loss” makes that undeniable.
8.5/10
“Loss” came out today, March 20th 2026 via Century Media Records and is available on CD, Vinyl, and digital formats on both the band’s website or Century Media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N5Ge0-9xQM
Gaerea “Loss”
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