The Paradise Lost singer says the label fitted the early records and still does, even if younger fans would not apply it to the band.
The tag stuck to Paradise Lost because they needed something to write on the form. Nick Holmes says that is about as much thought as went into it.
Asked by Kati Rausch of “Music Interview Corner” how he regards the band’s standing as pioneers of gothic metal, the singer traced it back to a period when everything was getting a name.
“I don’t know. 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. We didn’t really give it a lot of thought. But it kind of sums up particularly the early material; around the second album [1991’s Gothic], it kind of really fit the bill for that,” Holmes replied (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
He is not defensive about it now, nor especially attached: “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. 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.”
The album he mentions is the one the genre took its name from. Gothic came out in 1991, the band’s second record and the point at which the death-doom of the debut started picking up keyboards, female vocals and strings.
On being cited as a reference point by bands a generation behind them, Holmes put it in terms of a queue.
“It’s great. 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,” Holmes continued. “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, and that’s how it’s kind of gone for us listening to bands growing up, and for younger bands listening to us, I guess. So it’s just a generational thing.”
The band’s most recent album takes its name from a religious idea, though Holmes was not using it that way.
“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 minute you’re born. So I was thinking more along that line, as opposed to anything remotely religious. Although we do love religious imagery, as a band, we always appreciate religious imagery. We are not a religious band whatsoever, but we do like the art of that,” he said.
Ascension was released on September 19 last year through Nuclear Blast. It is their seventeenth studio album and their first of entirely new material since Obsidian in 2020, the longest gap between records in their career, filled partly by the Icon 30 re-recording and a run of anniversary shows. Gregor Mackintosh produced it at Black Planet in East Yorkshire, with drums and vocals cut at NBS and Wasteland in Sweden and Lawrence Mackrory handling the mix and master. “Silence Like The Grave“, “Serpent On The Cross” and “Tyrants Serenade” preceded it.
The drums on Ascension are Guido Zima‘s, and it is his last album with the band, he left in May 2025, shortly before release. Jeff Singer returned to the seat that month, a second stint after his run through 2007’s In Requiem.
Paradise Lost formed in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 1988, and four of the five members have been there throughout: Holmes, Mackintosh on lead guitar and keyboards, Aaron Aedy on rhythm guitar and Stephen Edmondson on bass. Their reach runs from Cradle Of Filth and HIM through to Gatecreeper and Chelsea Wolfe.
