(On November 21st Nuclear Blast will release a new EP from the Swedish metal band The Halo Effect, an EP named We Are Shadows that includes five cover songs, featuring one track picked by each band member. Our writer DGR has been a fan of the band, spent some time with this new EP, and wrote the following review.)
The year in heavy metal is going to have peaks and valleys. Previously, we could’ve viewed years in heavy metal as one seemingly unending torrential flood or the polar opposite in a semi-peaceful consistency, a steady flow of new albums, discoveries, and distractions in equal measure. The past handful of years, however, have been so brain-fried and birdshot when it comes to any form of a consistent release schedule that you could never tell what was going to arrive and – part of this due to getting older and being blissfully unaware of the world surrounding us – more often than not now it feels like we’re constantly getting blindsided by something just off in the distance arriving at the front door with all the aplomb and grandeur one might afford to a distant cousin deciding to bike across the country and wanting to crash at your house for the day. Not to say that there’s any personal experience in the matter, but come the fuck on dude, we’ve spoken one time in nearly forty years?
2024 could have been kindly described as a year of fits and starts at best, were it not for the feeling of burning the candle at both ends – as well as just immolating the whole fucking thing after dousing it in kerosene with the amount we wrote – but 2025 has been the first time in some time that things have felt… consistent. Sort of. We still seem to be drunkenly stumbling to a semblance of previous reality at times but this is more like the occasional stumble one might make when they’re just on the legal line and walking home after having cut themselves off hours ago.
Perhaps it’s the feeling and general attempted disconnect on this end of the screen, but 2025 has felt like one of the previous torrential flood years. There has just been so much available, and while there’ve definitely been albums that people seem to be rallying around, any sort of year-end festivities are going to read more like an encyclopedic attempt at ‘here’s what came out this year’ rather than an agreed-upon measure of quality. With that accepted consistency comes a road to travel at least, and so we walk from new release to new release and yet on occasion we are afforded dalliances with the unexpected. We don’t so much stumble off the path as we willingly fling ourselves off here, to write about a covers EP of all things, partially for the writing adventures heretofore promised and also a genuine curiosity.
Because after March Of The Unheard earlier this year, you can’t help but afford to be curious what The Halo Effect might have on offer because you can only exist on golden reputation for so long, and the sense here is that what We Are Shadows has on offer will do nothing to help provide a clearer picture of what The Halo Effect might be looking towards next. But, it is fun, and sometimes divorcing yourself from the wider thread of heavy metal to have fun can be just as worth it in the meantime. If not just for the perspective reset.
It won’t shock many to hear that much of The Halo Effect’s latest adventure sounds like a diversion before the band move on to the next grander adventure. Again, given that March Of The Unheard was unleashed earlier this year, the genesis of We Are Shadows may lay in those same sessions. Given the nature of album releases with country exclusives, bonus editions, digital editions, and who knows what else could pop up in our latest bowl of spaghetti flung at the wall that is the current music release scene, We Are Shadows could’ve congealed out of material meant to travel a variety of paths. As a result, the artistic scope is a little more limited, which is why we can cycle back around to the EP being ‘fun’.
It boils down to The Halo Effect making some interesting choices for songs and feeding them through a modernized melodeath filter. Describing it as just being played straight is putting it politely; much of the material here seems to have made lateral leaps with the most expected of changes being the most obvious. The Halo Effect’s choices are ones that still play to the band’s strengths, even if you never would’ve imagined your late-nineties and early-aught’s heroes tackling Kent’s “If You Were Here” at any point in your lifetime.
The Halo Effect are professional musicians at heart, which means they’re very knowledgeable at what they can and cannot do, so that they do play these covers typically straight is no surprise. Sadly, the dreams of a free-jazz freakout placed in the middle of Danzig’s “How The Gods Kill” must be left to the more free-with-their-reputation among us. A few of the choices made on We Are Shadows seem purpose-built to allow Mikael Stanne room to sing instead of growling his way through the EP, and given his work with Cemetery Skyline and their own goth-rock ambitions, the covers here seem to don a similar outfit when presented the opportunity.
We are to use Mikael Stanne’s lower singing voice as a comfort blanket to settle into instead of him chasing after checkpoints left behind by a song’s original vocalist. “How The Gods Kill” is already in the goth-rock territory and The Halo Effect just amplify that feeling further, shearing away some of the faux-sensual nature that Danzig’s own vocal stylings led on and cranking up the moroseness for a song that seems strange as an opener given that it never fully picks up. There’s no attempt at the Jim Morrison-esque ululations that Danzing became a caricature of as his career achieved multiple decades, but Stanne holds his own against the growing tension that the song seems to be building towards instead.
It may also be why The Halo Effect have the aforementioned “If You Were Here” cover immediately following, itself turned into a rock anthem, more upbeat than We Are Shadows‘ opening number, and made steadily heavier. More sung than anything else, but at the very least it’s nice to have something in the metal dude singing range of ‘monotone low’ to keep up with if we ever want to tackle this one in karaoke form.
Much like March Of The Unheard before it, it seems as if the melodeath-ass melodeath of The Halo Effect is to be reserved for maximum effect, gifted to use like mana from the heavens and not without equal trade it seems. It takes a bit but We Are Shadows does contain a proper one-two circle-pit kicker of a song, but as any proper villain movie genie will do, it also has to come with fine print. Thus, while Blackie Lawless continues to proselytize from the stage about how El Presidente is the most persecuted man in all of history with enough fervor that I inevitably turn into Ogre yelling “Nerds” in Revenge Of The Nerds, I must also own up to enjoying The Halo Effect’s take on W.A.S.P.’s “I Wanna Be Somebody”. If nothing else, taking the song and ramping up the intensity is enough to make it a standout among our shadow-drenched nightclub and goth-rock anthems that We Are Shadows unintentionally morphs itself into for three of its five songs. The equally upbeat and folk-metal inflected “Dance With The Devil” makes for a similar high mark if not because it also bleeds over into Delain’s territory for a bit in one of the more unexpected sentences one would’ve never expected to write.
Thus we cycle back around to the song which provides the EP its title, which comes courtesy of Broder Daniel’s “Shoreline”. The song is quickly turned anthemic and follows in formula to many of The Halo Effect’s favorite musical tropes: semi-acoustic opener followed by glorious guitar lead and driving guitar riff. If it seemed like you were waiting for the band to give you the ability to just slam fistfuls of popcorn into your face then “Shoreline” gives you the perfect opportunity. It’s neatly trimmed into a smidge over three minutes and forty seconds and the twin guitar lead that is the main melodic reprise gives the song enough juice that you almost miss the utterances of “We are shadows” the first few times it happens in the song. Granted, some of us are just dumb enough that we actually expected a song called “We Are Shadows”, saw that there was no such thing, and assumed the title was for thematic effect, without considering it would pop up in the closing song of the EP – but I don’t think I could own up to anyone who might’ve done such a thing.
We Are Shadows is best approached the same way much of The Halo Effect’s recent work is best approached. It’s not going to break any boundaries or really recontextualize how one might view a particular song but you can still have a lot of fun with it. The band oscillating between Stanne’s various other projects and their own guitar-lead-heavy take on melodeath as a whole is a little more obvious when you go song to song like We Are Shadows does – especially given the many corners from which these tracks arrive – but it still fits within The Halo Effect’s current universal musical output of ‘solid to great, perfect for shuffle’.
The Halo Effect are spread across many other musical projects, so you can never quite guess what the group’s future might look like, but as an addendum to March Of The Unheard, We Are Shadows makes for fun bonus material. You’re getting songs already confirmed to be enjoyable and just fed through the melodeath filter to the best of their ability, played relatively straight, and served back to you with a slice of gnarled guitar on top of it so we know that it is ‘heavy’ in the reptile part of one’s brain.
https://thehaloeffect.bfan.link/waslp
https://www.thehaloeffect.band/
https://www.facebook.com/thehaloeffectse