(NCS writer DGR pays a debt today, finally reviewing a debut album released five months ago by Finland’s Defiled Serenity that he’s been enjoying since then.)
Just in time to be late enough for the bus tracks from the public transit we missed to not only fade away but also be paved over again as the street is resurfaced!
Just before we set off on our jet-setting lifestyles that had a block of this website traveling coast to coast in May to take in only the finest vintages of heavy metal on stage, yours truly set out with a machine to absorb an equally large block of the heavy metal that had been released throughout the year in order to queue up the website to always have something to chat about while we were off wandering venue to venue.
The result was a wide snapshot of the world of underground heavy metal as it had existed so far in 2025, a disorganized ball of chaos that didn’t really have much of a throughline existing in it so far. Some years become reflective of society at large, others take after more recent events, but 2025 has been as odd as your more avant-garde wings of an art museum — somewhat unnerving and almost surrealistic horror-movie in that sort of way. Whatever themes may be developing to define this year musically — not socially, we’ve already landed on “hell” there — they just haven’t congealed yet and are almost refusing to do so.
We have, however, landed within a realm of a few amusing statistical blobs for those who love themselves some numbers nerd-ery, such as how it seems a contingent of Finland decided that all of their projects should see a release in some form or another within the first half of this year. Granted, it’s a wide net to be casting but it’s a pattern I’ve been joking about for months now.
photos by Sanna Lehtonen
Somewhat morose melodeath group Defiled Serenity were part of that trend and one of the bigger reasons why it seemed as if Finland had settled on the first part of the year as belonging to them. Their Inverse Records album Within The Slumber Of The Mind saw release on February 21st, 2025, and as a result became one of those many lucky contestants to be absorbed into the wider maw of NCS coverage.
While obviously we’re not the quickest on the ball here, there does exist something of an imagined debt owed to the group. There’s probably an SEO specialist somewhat ready to tear out their hair if they were ever assigned anything to do with this website, but that’s the fun part of our sort of well-intentioned chaos. One’s own imagined debt of having to say something about a project simply because you’d been enjoying it for a few months before saying a word about it to your wider audience gets to haunt you until you are able to bring some sort of discussion to fruition… even if it is nearly half a year late.
Defiled Serenity are a young-gun project of a melodeath band, having been founded in 2021 and existing on a scant collection of singles up until their aforementioned first full-length release earlier this year. The band pull from within the well-worn Finnish tradition of having an air of melancholy winding its way throughout their take on the more melodic side of death metal.
For some us who have fallen far too deep into the metal rabbit hole, the world of melodic death metal and all of its various offshoots can be a comfortable bubble-bath to immerse oneself in. In the case of this particular subset, that moment of relaxation is coupled with a beer or two simply because there is a lot of heavy stuff weighing on us mentally and the air remains thick with the things we need to take our mind off of. Within The Slumber Of The Mind, thusly, is a comfortably intense near forty-four minutes worth of music that combines together the group’s previously released singles — and a wildly out of left field cover song — alongside several new ones that don’t seek to break any boundaries of their chosen genre-form but rather to execute to the letter an expertly written and long-ironed-out blueprint.
Case in point: There is a sense of familiarity, which Defiled Serenity don’t have a care in the world about doing battle against, that runs throughout this album. This is a crew that have a destination and they are aiming directly for it with very few dalliances off of that path.
Defiled Serenity open Within The Slumber Of The Mind in a classic sense, acoustic guitar and scene-setting as well as some narration from one of the album’s two guest vocalists — which we’ll touch upon in a more amusing fashion later. The first two songs, “Voices From The Void” and “Exiled To Infinity”, tread along similar ground, stacking the building blocks of gorgeous guitar melodies and harsh verses and clean choruses alike. “Voices From The Void” does offer some generous spotlight to a lead bass guitar segment, which is not something you see often within the realms of the melodeath world, but Defiled Serenity do have a sense of groove to them that many bands do not play up as much, and you can’t do that without some heft in the rhythm section. This first pairing are also songs that initially saw release in the year prior to the album coming out, so they’ve had time to simmer before making their full-length debut. The other two singles lie in the back half of Within The Slumber Of The Mind.
Favoring the glory of the double-bass roll and power chorus, Defiled Serenity rumble their way through their first two songs and set expectations just as evenly. The simpler-titled pairing of “Death” — about as punctual and punchy as the title might suggest — and “Mortal” are where this release slows down a bit. “Mortal” conjures up the ghosts of their opening segment of the album and expands upon it to grow the longest song on this release with the care of a practiced gardener. It’s also one of the slower runs that take place within the boundaries of Within The Slumber Of The Mind but Defiled Serenity have given themselves over to the peaks-and-valleys approach in terms of tempo on their album.
Things pick up quickly again after that for the titular “Within The Slumber Of The Mind”, which is also an album highlight if not just for that fact that in the battle of sing-song guitar leads that’ll worm their way into your skull on this release, “Within The Slumber Of The Mind” may win out in terms of how long it is stuck in your head. There is something to be said for a backing light keyboard melody to help amplify such a thing as well, since Defiled Serenity also stack some backing choral samples alongside that for a truly epic few moments tagging alongside the earth-shaking growls. This could potentially be the song with which Defiled Serenity plant their flag to stand alongside their fellow melodeath peers.
“Through The Chaos” and “Your Worst Enemy” are of similar ilk as well, as this is a release that likes to move in pairings when it comes to overall “mood” of each song. These are two bigger, epic-sounding songs that travel hand-in-hand with their youngest sibling “Tears Of Black”. These are written to be gargantuan keyboard-backed and guitar-melody-laden affairs in such a way that even the vocal work takes a little bit of a back seat.
Both of these are songs that build from ideas introduced within the first three songs of the album, only to expound upon them in such a way that even though they’re more compact in terms of overall run time, they sound as if they’re the granded-in-scale brothers of those ideas. You can draw a throughline directly from the guitar work presented on “Exiled To Infinity” to the lead guitar work of “Through The Chaos”. Granted, shared influences are going to do that across a whole album but the shared DNA of Defiled Serenity’s two moods of “faster song and slower song” with little middle ground — save for “Death” and its mud-stomping rhythm — is recognizable.
All of this gives way to a very vocal-driven final track, which is where we get to have the fun “metal invades other world’s spheres” discussion with this album.
Defiled Serenity are fronted by none other than Paavo Laapotti, whom you might recognize from a few things: one, as the current lead vocalist for Before The Dawn — who run in a very similar genre track at times and are no doubt an influence on the burgeoning Defiled Serenity crew — and two, who made some waves as being a competitor on the Finnish version of the reality show/singing competition The Voice. He’s well within his singing and growling comfort zone here.
The connection to be made here is that he’s invited along some fellow cohorts from that show, including his “coach” from the show Juha Tapio, to provide those low-intonations and narration on Within The Slumber Of The Mind’s opening set-dresser “Alkutaival”. Fellow competitor Karisma also gets to travel along with the Defiled Serenity crew for backing vocals in the fifth song “Mortal” and for the wildly unexpected cover of Rihanna‘s “Unfaithful”. Within The Slumber Of The Mind is an album of folk-melody, beautifully dour atmospheres, and solid melodeath riff-work and then closes on one of the more surprising — and credit to the band, fairly well-transposed over to metal writing — cover songs out there.
There’s no doubt that Within The Slumber Of The Mind plays it pretty close to home in terms of what sort of band Defiled Serenity want to present themselves as. It was mentioned early on that the band have a pretty clear-cut target that they’re aiming for and they pretty much nail it. While the band are well within a melodeath comfort zone, so too is the listener, and there’s nothing that would cause someone to be rabidly objectionable here. Instead, there are times within this album when the band lyrically explore mental struggles and overwhelming darkness that the well-trod territory is easily settled into.
Other bands have done the subject matter far less justice than Defiled Serenity do here, other bands where it’s just rhythm and groove riffs with a me-against-the-world philosophy sort of blandness that Defiled Serenity skillfully dodge. Instead, this is a band who have shown they’re capable of standing — if not slightly behind — shoulder to shoulder with their influences and fellow melodeath peers. They have clearly been steadily honing their craft since their foundation and first single dating back to 2022 and now have an album of both gorgeous melodic moments — heroic especially on the guitar front — and headbang-heavy glory-choruses.
In short, Defiled Serenity have given themselves an immensely solid foundation to build their career upon with their first full-length here.
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