PARADISE LOST vocalist Nick Holmes has addressed the band's status as one of the founding acts of gothic metal — a genre tag they effectively handed the world, and one he has never lost sleep over.
Speaking to Kati Rausch of Music Interview Corner, Holmes explained that the label was less a manifesto than a matter of convenience. "We kind of came up with that title at a time when everybody was labeling everything, and it was kind of the only one that we felt fit the music, really," he said. "We didn't really give it a lot of thought. But it kind of sums up particularly the early material; around the second album, it kind of really fit the bill for that." That second album, 1991's "Gothic," did rather more than fit the bill — it gave an entire movement its name.
Three and a half decades later, Holmes remains unbothered by how the term has drifted. "We don't really think about labels too much, I guess, but we still have no problem calling ourselves that, though I'm sure a lot of maybe younger people wouldn't even regard us as gothic metal," he said. "They think another younger band, that is gothic metal and we are not. But it's not a problem. I don't lay awake at night worrying about these things."
On being named as an influence by successive waves of younger bands, Holmes describes a simple generational relay. "It's the same way that the guys in the bands that are in their 60s, such as bands like CELTIC FROST and DEATH and SODOM and CANDLEMASS — these bands are all a few years older than we are, and we were influenced by them," he said. "And then we've got the guys who are kind of three, four years younger than us in bands that kind of listen to us. So there's a four-year interval for people to get into bands, and then the next gen gets into that band."
Holmes also unpacked the title of the band's seventeenth album, "Ascension," released last September. "'Ascension,' in the biblical terms, is about rising up to God and rising up to greatness. But I kind of find that throughout life, all you're trying to do is rise up and do the best that you possibly can from the minute you're born," he said. "So I was thinking more along that line, as opposed to anything remotely religious. Although we do love religious imagery, as a band... We are not a religious band whatsoever, but we do like the art of that."
The band's first LP in five years, following 2020's "Obsidian," "Ascension" was produced by guitarist Gregor Mackintosh and mixed and mastered by Lawrence Mackrory.
Formed in Halifax in 1988 and now past two million albums sold, PARADISE LOST have moved from doom-death roots through the lush mainstream heft of 1995's "Draconian Times" to electronic experimentation and back again, leaving fingerprints on artists as varied as CRADLE OF FILTH, GATECREEPER and Chelsea Wolfe. The current lineup is Holmes, Mackintosh (lead guitar/keyboards), Aaron Aedy (rhythm guitar), Stephen Edmondson (bass) and Jeff Singer (drums).