Portugal’s gothic metal standard-bearers Moonspell return with Far From God, their thirteenth studio album, which doesn’t so much chase the past as drag it kicking and screaming into the present. Vampires, guilt, faith, and longing are rendered with a conviction that Moonspell haven’t shown in years.
MOONSPELL
Moonspell have lived under the shadow of Irreligious for the better part of three decades now, and every record since has had to answer for it in one way or another. Some albums shrugged that comparison off by going somewhere else entirely – the orchestral sprawl of Night Eternal, the stripped-back Portuguese folk excursion of 1755. Others leaned into it. Far From God does neither, not exactly. It simply sounds like a band who have stopped running from their own reputation and decided, after five hard years, to meet it head on.
Five years is a long gap by Moonspell’s usual standards, and it shows in the way this record carries itself – not rushed, not padded, eight songs that all earn their place. Fernando Ribeiro has spoken about the difficulty of getting here, describing dozens of scrapped lyric sets and a shortlist of album titles that ran into double figures before Far From God won out. You can hear that hesitation resolved into clarity across the record.
The gap itself wasn’t empty. Hermitage landed in 2021 in a world still reeling from lockdowns, and Moonspell, like a lot of bands of their vintage, spent the years after wondering aloud whether they had anything left to say. That uncertainty hung over interviews and social posts for a long stretch. Far From God is the answer to that uncertainty, and it’s a more decisive one than I expected going in.
STAKING THEIR CLAIM
The album’s opening run is where Moonspell stake their claim most directly, and it does so through the band’s oldest and most reliable subject: doomed, romantic darkness, played without a trace of irony.
Cross Your Heart opens proceedings, and it’s a deliberately confident way to start, a song built on a simple, propulsive riff of the kind Moonspell used to produce on command in their nineties pomp and have struggled to summon consistently since. Lyrically, it sits in more grounded territory than the gothic flourishes that follow it: memorials at the roadside, lives ended too early, grief that settles into a landscape and never quite leaves. It’s an unusually direct way to open a record this steeped in myth and metaphor, and it works because it earns the bigger, stranger material that comes after it rather than competing with it.
Then comes the title track, and it’s obvious within seconds why this was chosen as the first single. Far From God is Moonspell doing what they do better than almost anyone else in this genre – vampiric romance played entirely straight, no irony, no wink to camera. Ribeiro has talked at length about losing patience with vampires as a subject in modern metal, frustrated by how often the imagery gets reduced to cut-price costume-shop theatrics on one side and overwrought, semi-tuned symphonic posturing on the other.
DOMOED MYTHS
It took Robert Eggers’ 2024 Nosferatu to pull him back toward the genuinely tragic, doomed version of the myth that drew him to it as a young songwriter in the first place, and you can feel that rediscovery running through every bar of this song. The keyboards build something close to a cathedral around Ribeiro’s voice without ever softening the weight of the riffs underneath, and the shifts between hushed verse and towering chorus land with real conviction rather than going through the motions.
There’s a reason the promotional language around this album keeps reaching for Irreligious as a touchstone, and the title track is Exhibit A – not a copy of that record, but a band rebuilding the feeling of it from first principles rather than from memory.
VAMPIRIC CONVICTION
Biblical takes the same vampiric conviction and slows it right down. Pereira’s bass carries the song’s opening stretch on a low, circling pulse, and the band seem content to let the track breathe rather than rush it toward a payoff. Ribeiro keeps his delivery deliberately reined in through the early verses. There’s a sense of something being withheld rather than performed, which makes the eventual release, several minutes in, land with genuine force when his voice finally cracks open into the album’s first proper growls. It’s a patient, well-judged piece of sequencing within the song itself, and a reminder that Moonspell’s command of atmosphere hasn’t dulled with age.
If the opening run is about myth, the middle stretch of Far From God is where the record turns toward something closer to grief and care, and it’s arguably the strongest sequence on the album for it.
The Great Wolf in the Sky is the clear emotional high point. Strings from Alicia Nuhro widen the arrangement out into something closer to chamber music in its quieter passages, and the song carries real weight as a piece of tribute – written, by the band’s own account, partly in memory of a fan and friend who didn’t live to hear the finished album. That context shapes how the whole thing lands. The chorus is built with the kind of scale that’s clearly aimed at a few thousand voices singing along in a field somewhere, and on record, it already carries that scope without needing the crowd to complete it. Of everything here, this is the song that proves Moonspell can still write something genuinely moving, not just genuinely heavy.
CONSISTENT MOMENTUM
Your Promise of Light pulls back from that peak without losing momentum, moving between near-whispered verses, a fuller and more lustrous clean delivery, and bursts of aggression that never quite tip into all-out extremity. The slower tempo gives the song room to breathe that some of the more compact tracks don’t allow, and the band sound entirely comfortable letting it stretch out. It’s not the most immediate thing here, but it rewards the kind of patient, repeated listening this whole record seems to be asking for.
For the Love of Mortals takes things further still into tenderness, and it might be the most exposed song on the album. Where the rest of the record deals in eternal, mythic versions of love, this one is concerned with the smaller and more fragile humankind, what it can carry, and what it can’t. The arrangement stays delicate through the verses, vocals and synths kept close and quiet, before the song gradually opens out toward something more like acceptance than triumph by its close. It’s a quietly confident piece of sequencing, offering a genuine moment of warmth before the record turns back toward darker ground.
SHIFTING THE EMOTIONAL REGISTER
The album’s closing pair shift the emotional register again, away from love and tribute and toward something harder and more self-accusing.
Our Freedom to Fall is the closest the record gets to outright doom, and Hugo Ribeiro’s drumming, understated for most of the album, finally gets room to push forward properly. Lyrically, it’s the most uncomfortable thing here: a song built around guilt, self-destruction and the difficulty of breaking a pattern you already know is killing you, delivered with none of the softening that surrounds it elsewhere on the record. Because the use of growls are sparing across the rest of the album, the ones that surface in this song land with disproportionate weight. It isn’t the most adventurous piece of songwriting on Far From God, but on a single listen, it might be the one that hits hardest.
The record closes with Reconquista, its longest piece by a clear margin, and the band clearly intends it as a statement closer rather than a quiet exit. There’s a genuinely excellent guitar solo at its centre, the kind of moment that justifies the extra runtime on its own, and the song reaches for something properly epic in its closing minutes. If I’m being honest, that’s also where it slightly overreaches – the final stretch keeps circling back on itself rather than building cleanly toward a last statement, and a tighter edit in the back third would have left the album with no real soft spot to point to at all.
FAR FROM GOD
Thematically, none of this is new ground for Moonspell. Vampires, werewolves, guilt, faith, desire and mortality have all turned up across this band’s catalogue before, in various combinations, and there’s no pretending otherwise. The change is in the conviction behind it. There’s a version of this record that treats all that gothic and vampiric imagery as knowing performance, something delivered at arm’s length with a wink attached. Far From God refuses that option entirely. Ribeiro sounds like he means every word of it, and that sincerity is what separates this from a band simply repeating old tricks for an audience that already knows the script.
The Irreligious comparisons that have followed this album since it was announced aren’t wrong, exactly, but they’re not the whole story either. Far From God shares real DNA with that record – dense gothic atmosphere, vampiric material handled with total sincerity, Ribeiro’s voice still the unmistakable centre of gravity everything else organises itself around. But where Irreligious was a young band discovering what they could do, this is a band thirty years into a career, deliberately choosing to lean back into the version of themselves that people fell for in the first place. That’s a harder trick to pull off than it sounds, and the fact that it mostly works is genuinely impressive this deep into a discography
Moonspell didn’t need to make a record this good. They clearly wanted to, and that wanting comes through on every track here. It’s the sound of a band that went looking for their own ghosts and found something worth bringing back.
Moonspell: Website