“I don’t want this to be something I cannot control,” this coming from the excellent “In Darkness” sums up the beautiful dichotomy at play throughout Nordic Gothic. Rarely if ever does a band just emerge like this fully formed (though we have three new goth bands for you this issue). However, Cemetery Skyline feel distinct from so many of these neo-gothic bands. This isn’t house music with some C-rate Depeche Mode nihilism; nor does the band traffic in mediocre Misfits or Type O Negative nostalgia without the hooks.
Cemetery Skyline feels like a genuinely new and fresh idea: what if everything that made the 80s and 90s underground music scene great were made by metal musicians who flat-out refused to write extreme metal for once? What if an idea – to create some dark rock homage – got out of control, or at least grew into something greater than some of the most talented Nordic metal musicians had expected. Featuring members of Dark Tranquillity, Amorphis, Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum, and The Abbey, Cemetery Skyline is littered with towering hooks and ironically subtle synths. Tasteful goth? Hell yeah!
Keyboardist Santeri Kallio elaborates on how the band came to be:
“It was kind of a mystery in the first place. Well in a way we all lived through 80s and 90s dark neo-rock, crossover and Gothic times. Everyone had a pretty strong idea about what Cemetery Skyline could actually be and sound like. Of course, the idea came first: to make dark music with echoes from the best 80s and 90s vibes like Type O, Mission, Sisters of Mercy and so on. We all lived through these times, watched MTV videos, and later in the mid-90s, started to tour across Central Europe with our other bands, partying our asses of in Metal and Gothic Clubs and tour vehicles.
“I think what steered us most, musically, was: what are we not going to do – like, extreme metal or any kind of death/thrash metal riffing. The musical direction was and actually is very wide – like you can hear echoes from even early 80s till late 90s. I think there’s such a variety; we really did not restrict anything; there was almost total freedom to write music and see what happens.”
NordicGothic is out on Friday, and you can preorder it from Century Media Records. Follow Cemetery Skyline on Facebook,Instagram, and TikTok for future updates.
Photo courtesy of Sam Jamsen
