Host: Gregor Mackintosh and Nick Holmes regain their former grace

IX

NUCLEAR BLAST

Paradise Lost’s creative kernel reawaken their goth-pop passion

WITH ITS ARTY photography and Times New Roman lowercase betokening a full flight into millennial alt rock, Paradise Lost’s 1999 album Host proved a bridge too far for a significant tranche of the band’s fanbase. Doubling down on the electronic goth-pop influence that dominated 1997’s transformative One Second, the even poppier follow-up left a trail of heartbroken headbangers in its wake. Many felt disenfranchised and disconsolate that UK metal’s brightest hope had cut their hair, dimmed the guitars and drunk the Depeche Mode Kool-Aid. And not least because it was so soon after 1995’s Draconian Times had brought classic UK HM back into the Top 20, apparently securing a glorious future for a band often hyped as the ‘Yorkshire Metallica’. For another section of their fanbase, however, Host was an awestruck awakening, PL’s immersion in gothic electro-pop proving just as influential across European scenes as their early experiments in gothic death-doom.

Since Gregor Mackintosh rediscovered his distortion pedals, Nick Holmes learned to roar again, and PL regrew their metallic fangs, the controversial Host sound can now be affectionately revisited – and discreetly perfected. With this project, these longstanding creative partners have reapplied themselves to the softer, synth-heavy stylings of late 90s PL, bringing 20 years of musical and personal growth to bear on these more nakedly emotional songs.