Looking at the neon-lit cover of Gaerea’s fifth full-length record ‘Loss,’ you can tell that the winds of change are blowing: the band that made the suffocating post-black metal of 2018’s ‘Unsettling Whispers’ and 2020’s ‘Limbo’ may wear the same masks they always did, but it’s abundantly clear that their priorities as musicians have shifted in the last few years. What has not changed, however, is Gaerea’s presence as an exciting up-and-coming force in the metal underground. Stacked up against such stiff competition, ’Loss’ may be their weakest record to date— it’s still pretty darn good though.

Yes, every black metal fan’s worst nightmare has come true: Gaerea have upheld the sonic evolution they underwent on 2024’s ‘Coma,’ transitioning into a full-on metalcore act. Weighing their unsettling aesthetic up against the soft crooning of a cut like ‘Cyclone,’ it wouldn’t be completely untoward to compare them to the likes of Sleep Token— please rest assured that, even on their most accessible release to date, the Portugese band still exude metal malice in a way that Vessel and company simply don’t. Gaerea were always known more for their thunderous post metal barrages than for their black metal influences, and ‘Loss’ is yet another record benefitting from the band’s penchant for slow-building intensity. Looking past the glossier production and the more typical song structures they’re wrapped up in, these tracks are stuffed with the ferocious blast beats, desperate emotions and crushing crescendos that made something like 2022’s ‘Mirage’ such a powerful piece of work. ‘Loss’ simply dolls these elements up in a new, brighter coat of paint.

The album’s successes lie more in the respectable talents of Gaerea as musicians, rather than in their recent pursuit of modern metalcore: still, its first half makes one hell of an effort to justify that change in direction, plowing its way through all the strongest material that ‘Loss’ has to offer. ‘Luminary’ is a bold statement to open the album on as one of the tracks here that least resembles the band’s previous work. It’s a song dominated by ballsy drum grooves, blistering guitar chugs and a real monster of a chorus, and if you’re willing to accept how readily Gaerea have thrown themselves at metalcore, you’d have to agree that the cut is nothing less than thrilling— the pained roar of vocalist Alpha fits their modern sound incredibly well, rounding out this mammoth of a tone-setter. It’s not until lead single ‘Submerged’ that ‘Loss’ puts in the legwork to connect itself to its predecessors, smashing clean vocals and flowery piano lines against its blast beat-backed verses and generally suffocating sound design: put plainly, the cut succeeds in all the same ways that 2024’s ‘Coma’ did.

‘Hellbound’ does arguably the best job at weaving elements of modern metalcore into the unyielding post metal of Gaerea’s past, and it may just be the strongest cut on the album because of it. The track is a relentless barrage of driving percussive blasts and desperate lead melodies (topped off by a scream of “I burn like fire” so visceral that it might just give you goosebumps) that manages to be both harrowing and catchy in the same breath— it’s not as overwhelming as the band’s previous work, sure, but the approach being taken here isn’t reliant on brutality alone. Both ‘Uncontrolled’ (with an opening riff you could’ve pulled straight from Slipknot’s ‘We Are Not Your Kind’) and ‘Phoenix’ toy with that delicate balance of power and melody, with the latter taking a particularly anthemic approach to post-metalcore that incorporates cinematic string and piano accompaniments. ‘Loss’ may not be as dizzying as ‘Unsettling Whispers,’ but it’s equally massive (albeit in a very different way).

Having said all that, the fact remains that these tracks work better as Gaerea songs than they do as metalcore jams— the band only commit themselves to their new sound more and more as the record progresses, and by the end, it becomes clear that this stylistic diversion winds up working against them. Calling this a ‘sellout record’ would be much too harsh, but it’s a term that comes to mind anyway once the sappy balladry of ‘Cyclone’ (carrying with it all the over-enunciated vocals, lyrical cliches and flat mixing decisions that tend to plague modern metal) fades in: even if the song does eventually manage to whip itself up into a cacophony worthy of its name, the damage has already been done. Single ‘Nomad’ indulges in all the hallmarks that worked for ‘Hellbound’ and ‘Submerged’ and sees some success with them, but there’s an insincerity to its big sing-along chorus that might just rub you the wrong way. As for the painfully melodramatic presentation and the awful, awful pseudo-rapping on closer ‘Stardust,’ we’ll generously chalk the track up to inexperience in the genre: truthfully, this is not how we would have wanted the record to go out.

‘Loss’ does work, and it works because Gaerea made it: the group are still able to stop you in your tracks with the towering majesty of their soundscapes, even when things have changed a little in recent years. Truth be told, metalcore wasn’t necessarily an avenue we needed the band to go down, and if their next album is even glossier and more sentimental than this one, we may be in for a true dud of a release. For now, though, there’s just too much fire coursing through ‘Hellbound,’ ‘Luminary’ and ‘Uncontrolled’ to dismiss: however you like your post metal, there should still be something here for you.