Gaerea – Loss
Century Media Records
8,0/10,0
Brief:
GAEREA is nothing short of a beautiful enigma rooted in musical extremity and utter passion. In under a decade, the masked collective, born in the Portuguese town of Porto, has navigated countless darkened shades of metal to arrive at their fifth album and Century Media debut, Loss.
Loss is the sound of GAEREA continuing to define and redefine itself, incorporating elements of the band’s post-black metal past with the sharpened sonics and haunting melodies that coalesced spectacularly with 2024’s album, Coma. Recorded in early 2025 in Portugal with long-running collaborator Miguel Teroso at Demigod Recordings, Loss finds GAEREA emerging from creative chrysalis and bursting into something as engaging as it is unexpected. From the bombast that opens the record with “Luminary” to the album’s elegiac closer, “Stardust”, you can hear every member pushing their personal and creative limits. There’s singing. There are choruses as catchy and passionate as the best rock and metal songs. Yet, through the emotionally charged din, it’s unmistakably GAEREA.
Indeed, GAEREA has built its reputation on a blackened blueprint. Choosing a self-spawned name with no connection to any convenient metal tropes, GAEREA became a vehicle for its members to explore the frayed edges of the human condition without self-imposed limitations. “Up until Mirage (2022), it’s true, we wanted to be this super aggressive black metal band like Watain, or maybe one day be able to play with Behemoth,” says the frontman of GAEREA’s earliest utterances and albums like 2018’s Unsettling Whispers or 2020’s Limbo. “We love those bands, but we didn’t want to become the next Behemoth. We wanted to be the next GAEREA.”
The band’s masked and ritualistic live presence has become not just part of the show, but an integral part of GAEREA that pushes their musical extremity into the philosophical avant-garde. Their uniform was designed to provide a faceless, androgynous shield that allows for them to freely launch into a performance often defined by its own physicality. “I think the way we perform, the way we play, the way we dance onstage goes hand-in-hand with the way we look,” states the frontman. “We’re showing more of ourselves, exposing ourselves. We’ve unlocked that freedom where we can do whatever we want. Why would we play into the façade of being a very aggressive band with our feet on the monitors when we can just dance?”
That metaphysical detail also extends to GAEREA’s use of symbolism and the sigils that not only adorn their masks but also their stages. It’s a call-back to our origins,” states the vocalist. “The sigils on the masks are the Asmoday sigil [aka Asmodeus, the Greek/Hebrew Prince of Demons and representation of lust] but these days those are symbols of us. Like us dressing in all black and painting our arms, they’re something that will stand until the end of our career.”
Loss is the sound of the masked specters of GAEREA laying their souls bare. Musically and emotionally, they’re opening themselves up and bringing a decade’s worth of musical and personal soul-rending into sharper focus and becoming a genre-of-one in the process. “We’re not a black metal band anymore, if we ever were,” states the vocalist. “We always have been compared to hardcore bands and post-hardcore and shoegaze and post-this and post-that. We’re slowly finding our way as a band but just as importantly, as people, but the DNA is always there. This is GAEREA”
[Edited Press Release]
Tracklist:
- Luminary
- Submerged
- Hellbound
- Uncontrolled
- Phoenix
- Cyclone
- LBRNTH
- Nomad
- Stardust
Main Focus Tracks:
- Luminary
- Uncontrolled
- Phoenix
- Nomad
Other Recommended Tracks:
- Submerged
- Hellbound
- Cyclone
Line-Up:
Guilherme Henriques – Vocals, Guitars
Sonja Schuringa – Guitars
Lucas Ferrand – Bass
Diogo Mota – Drum
Comments:
In Loss, Gaerea blends its refined black metal with a metalcore edge reminiscent of Bring Me the Horizon. The album stands out for the band’s expanded musical horizons, but it falls somewhat short in terms of originality. Gaerea remains brutal and demonstrates a promising future, yet it still needs to reassess its compositional direction moving forward.
Contacts:
Video:
Selected Discography:
Unsettling Whispers – 2018
Limbo – 2020
Mirage – 2022
Coma – 2024
Loss – 2026
Photo credit: Chantik Photography