(Below you’ll find DGR‘s extensive review of the eagerly awaited new album from the Swedish band In Mourning, released at the end of August by Supreme Chaos Records and Dalapop.)

Over the course of a two-decade-plus career and seven full-length albums, Sweden’s In Mourning have had eras to their overall sound. Considering how varied their overall discography has been, you can still – albeit with stretching that would make your average fitness class jealous – somewhat neatly gather together their releases into historical periods of the band.

The core of their overall progressive death metal sound over the years has been augmented time and time again, resulting in a forlorn and poetic melodeath era of the group that saw full expansion in The Shrouded Divine and Monolith as well as a conceptual, more doom- and post-metal oriented mid-era of their career comprised of albums like The Weight Of Oceans, Afterglow, and Garden Of Storms.

A band having specific historical epochs like this is often reflective of landmark albums and seismic changes to a band’s overall sound – which often follows with releases that run in a similar vein as a band discovers a new path to travel down, either to diminishing returns over time or with a sound that becomes so ingrained with their identity that they’re near inseparable. Continue reading »

(DGR prepared the following review of the new album by the Swedish band In Mourning, just released on November 26th.)

In Mourning have definitely found a sound since the heady days of 2012 and their release of The Weight Of Oceans. Creating their own loosely conceptual lyrical universe, that album laid the groundwork for just about every release of In Mourning that followed it. While early works in the band’s discography would land them on the radar of prog-death fans – and I will go to bat for Monolith being an absolutely fantastic and underrated release – The Weight Of Oceans and its doom and post-metal influences would be where In Mourning would stake their claim.

Both 2016’s Afterglow and 2019’s Garden Of Storms continued along that path, acting as extensions of that musical world, sometimes wandering down a more death metal oriented path and sometimes going full avant-garde, as Garden Of Storms would reach its tendrils into every crevice it found. Now firmly ensconced in their corner of the progressive death metal world and with an even smaller gap between releases, In Mourning are with us once again with The Bleeding Veil, the group’s sixth full-length and the third release so far to contain seven songs in its track list.

Given that the throughline of The Bleeding Veil and its two most recent siblings is so similar, it’s interesting to see what paths In Mourning have decided to chart this time around. The Bleeding Veil is In Mourning in full focusing mode, as the disc takes all of the different directions that Garden Of Storms shot out and hones them down, refining them into a much more tied and tighter release. Continue reading »