There’s a tension burning at the heart of Gaerea’s new album, Loss. You can see it at the end of the video for its infernal single, “Hellbound”. A human figure is transported up towards heaven, just as on the album artwork. But celestial bliss is denied and the body vaporizes. Loss is a record in which Gaerea is reaching for ascension, and risks being burned up in the process.
“We’ve always dealt with a lot of paradoxes,” says frontman and principal songwriter, Alpha. “In everything we've done, there’s light and darkness; hope, but also a lot of despair.”
For Alpha, Loss is a profoundly personal album, largely dispensing with The Vortex Society mythos Gaerea has developed in previous releases. It’s a record about overthinking and tangling with issues buried since Alpha's teenage years. As he approaches thirty, he says, they have “come back to bite me in the ass”.
It’s also an album about the band’s success and Alpha’s attendant feeling of emotional rootlessness, expressed most directly in the song “Nomad”. He describes the last few years as the band being in “full-fucking-mode”, with a bigger stage show and touring party, as well as endless meetings with management, merch people, and all the business stuff that comes with creating art. That’s all fine, but if all you have to return to at the end of a grueling tour is, in Alpha’s words, “a shitty rented apartment where you can’t even fit shit”, then it becomes a problem.
Alpha wanted to address all of this on Loss, though he knew the risks: “It's not [perceived as] cool for artists to talk about these things, because you need to commit to a sort of artistry.”
Loss, Gaerea's fifth full-length, finds Alpha edging towards a more defined identity, and taking stock. His bandmates – Rho (bass), XI (drums) and Delta (guitars) – were “super-pumped” to be more involved in its early writing stages. This is usually an isolated affair where Alpha holes up with the bare essentials to demo material. Loss took three times longer to write and record than the six months the band spent working on 2022’s Mirage. They had even finished the opening track, “Luminary”, before any of the songs from 2024’s Coma were released.
The new songs represent another leap forward for a band which has bounded ahead of its initial reputation as a black metal act with its debut album in 2018, Unsettling Whispers. This is particularly clear in Alpha’s vocals, where he often hits a melodic scream that recalls Joe Duplantier and even Chester Bennington: “All of my Linkin Park teenager references are in this record,” he says, with what I imagine is a twinkle in his eye on our audio-only Zoom call.
He speaks about the album representing an “aggressive change” for Gaerea, as a band at an impasse. They undertook it not without a little nervousness about how it would be received. But it reflects a devil-may-care attitude towards their songwriting where metalcore, hardcore and death metal blend together with their traditional black metal influences, shades of nu metal and poppy choruses.
“I was starting to get super fucking bored with my growls,” he admits. “If I could find other ways to express myself without it being just with anger, I think this would elevate the meaning of the songs.”
There’s more than a little Sleep Token in the album’s final track, “Stardust”, with Alpha’s plaintive, processed singing voice accompanied by a piano. It’s the closest Gaerea has come to Sleep Token’s sonic territory. Both started at a similar time as anonymous masked bands. Gaerea’s cloth masks are adorned with sigils derived from Asmodeus, the prince of demons, and representations of lust. But now the band’s emotional range is much broader.
“Stardust” concerns coming to terms with the loss of a friend when Alpha was a teenager. It sees him “gazing up at the stars and trying to understand the world a bit more through such a deeper negativity and loneliness.”
He returns frequently in our conversation to the idea of the tides of his teenage experiences washing up in the present, and the album as a means to process them. But though “Stardust” provides a light at the end of the tunnel, Loss is far from a resolution.
“I don't see it as a cure,” he says “I mean, it would be highly romantic to say, ‘Oh, okay, now I'm cured. I don't have to deal with these things anymore.’ I mean, no. It's more like opening the door for me to see things from a different perspective.”
For all its diversity and more fragile moments, Loss is still a hellishly heavy album. “Submerged” is a torrent of regret, whirlpooling around the “memories circling below”. It finds Alpha “drowning in the shadows of my past”. But in the album’s depictions of struggle are also the seeds of ascendancy. In “Phoenix”, he flips the script, now the “leader of this fight” with “no more shadows in my way”.
These recurring lyrical motifs convey the struggles with overthinking that Loss depicts. Imagery keeps returning, refusing to let go of Gaerea. Alpha believes that confronting these emotions can only begin in darkness. “Luminary” and “Stardust”, the first and last songs on the album, both contain the phrase “I need the dark”, something the band only noticed once Alpha started recording his vocals.
“Everything starts to make sense once you're in your darker moments,” he says. “At least, it was in a very dark moment that I realized that this album had to be done in this way. That's when I decided that this album was going to be about myself, about these things that I have to deal with – that I've been dealing with for the last couple of years.”
“Hellbound” is a dialogue with himself, or maybe a monologue in front of the mirror. He gives himself a hard time. “You say you love me, but I know the truth,” he sings. It isn’t aimed at a romantic partner, but at himself.
“When I say ‘you’ in this song, I'm talking to myself,” he says. “It's like you're talking to your other self on the other side of the table. So the whole love situation [it describes], it's self-love. It's not meant to be to another person.”
Loss juxtaposes this intense, personal self-reflection with a sound that will open the floodgates for the band. Emerging from Porto, it wasn’t easy getting a foothold to emerge from Portugal’s small metal scene. Moonspell was one of the few guiding lights from the country to show the way.
The sacrifices – five years of relentless touring in a cramped van – were considerable. But the payoff is happening, to the extent that Alpha is fully aware that new fans are coming to the band’s latest singles who wouldn’t have the stomach for the ferocity of some of their early material. This represents a transfusion of sorts, after the bloodletting of fans who don’t want to evolve with the band.
Except that the bloodletting is not really happening. The feedback for the new material suggests that their established fans are along for the ride. The band is benefitting from a broadmindedness in today’s listenership which has been ushered in by the streaming generation. If Coma was about Gaerea letting go of labels, Loss is about forgetting them completely.
Ten years since the band’s formation, Loss documents a self-reckoning for Gaerea, whilst opening up the way forward. It breaks a cycle that threatens Alpha’s mental health; of a life on the road without a solid scaffolding of family and friends to support him. As an album, it plunges listeners into a darkness which makes the emerging light that much brighter.
The relentless focus on making the next record, booking a bigger tour, playing a more prestigious festival, and not caring what is left behind, seems to be over for Gaerea. The question remains: how will they manage with the success a landmark album like this will bring?
“I think these 10 years have been very, very crazy and great for me, and the people in the band,” says Alpha. “I mean, we're very grateful for this band and for all the things that we're able to do, thanks to the fans and everyone else involved. But you also realize, what's the price to pay, sometimes, to do something like this?”
For all the emotional turmoil on this album, the biggest thing Gaerea is losing is fear itself: fear of the past and fear of themselves. There might be a nagging devil on their shoulder a while longer, but the only way is skyward.
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Loss, the new album from Gaerea arrives March 20th via Century Media. Order the album - HERE
GAEREA TOUR DATES
12 June 26 (CZ) Hradec Králové - Rock for People
13 June 26 (DE) Munich - Technikum
14 June 26 (IT) Ferrara - Ferrara Summer Fest
15 June 26 (IT) Milan - Q-Hub
16 June 26 (CH) Aarau - Kiff
20 Jun 26 (FR) Clisson - Hellfest
21 Jun 26 (BE) Dessel - Graspop Metal Meeting
23 June 26 (DE) Cologne - Club Vola
25 June 26 (DE) Hamburg - Bahnhof Pauli
27 Jun 26 (NO) Oslo - Tons of Rock
03 Jul 26 (ES) Viveiro - Resurrection Fest
07 Jul 26 (AUS) Perth - Amplifier Bar
09 Jul 26 (AUS) Adelaide - Lion Art Factory
10 Jul 26 (AUS) Melbourne - Max Watts
11 Jul 26 (AUS) Brisbane - Crow Bar
12 Jul 26 (AUS) Sydney - Crow Bar
17 Jul 26 (DE) Weil am Rhein - Baden in Blut Fest
04 Aug 26 (FR) Seignosse - LE TUBE (w/ In Flames)
05 Aug 26 (ES) Pamplona - Totem Club
08 Aug 26 (ES) Devilla - Pandora
13 Aug 26 (FR) Carhaix-Plouguer - Motocultor Festival
15 Aug 26 (DE) Sulingen - Reload Festival
19 Aug 26 (NO) Bergen - USF Verfet (w/ In Flames)
20 Aug 26 (NO) Tønsberg - Foynhagen (w/ In Flames)
22 Aug 26 (SE) Göteborg - Göteborg Brinner (w/ In Flames, Avatar, Dark Tranquillity, Raised Fist, Thrown, Napalm Death…)
28 Aug 26 (ES) Fuengirola - Sun and Thunder Fest
