Thirty years is a long time to stay sad, but few bands have turned sorrow into a career quite as gracefully as Insomnium.

INSOMNIUM

Thirty years is a long time to stay sad, but few bands have turned sorrow into a career quite as gracefully as Insomnium. Formed in Joensuu, North Karelia, back in 1997, the Finns have spent the best part of three decades refining one very particular strain of melodic death metal, heavy enough to keep the old guard onside, mournful enough to leave the back row misty-eyed – and somewhere along the way they became one of the genre’s most dependable institutions. Each of their last three studio albums went to number one at home, and 2023’s Anno 1696 broke into the German top five. Netherworlds is album number ten, and it arrives carrying all the expectation a milestone like that brings with it.

It is also a record that deliberately steps away from the format that defined its two most ambitious predecessors. Winter’s Gate and Anno 1696 were both built on short stories by bassist and vocalist Niilo Sevanen. The former a single forty-minute Viking voyage, the latter a bleak tale of famine and witch hunts set in the Nordic north of the 1690s, whereas Netherworlds is bound together by atmosphere rather than plot. Sevänen calls lead single Shadowlife “a thematic gateway to the entire record,” describing it as “an elegy not only for a lost beloved, but also for the fading belief that anything beautiful can remain untouched by time.” Love, loss, sleep, night, and the blurred country between them: that is the territory, and for a band whose name conjures sleepless nights and the dreams that haunt them, it feels less like a new direction than a homecoming.

THE CORE IDENTITY

This is the first Insomnium album since 2016’s Winter’s Gate without Jani Liimatainen in the ranks, whose spell as a full member ran from 2019 to 2024 after years as a touring stand-in for Ville Friman. His replacement, Tomy Laisto, had been filling the role on the road since 2024 before being confirmed as a permanent member in January, which keeps the three-guitar formation intact and gives the band yet another clean voice to share alongside Friman and Markus Vanhala. The production team has shifted as well: Miiro Varjus takes the producer and engineer’s chair and, by the band’s own account, was central to how the record took shape, with Jens Bogren mixing and Tony Lindgren mastering at Fascination Street.

Sound-wise, none of that upheaval has dented the core identity. This is still unmistakably Insomnium – the tremolo leads that seem to weep in harmony, Sevanen’s dry, rasping growl set against clean choruses that rise like mist off a lake, and Markus Hirvonen’s drumming that knows exactly when to gallop and when to hold back. Vanhala admits he set out to write “an obvious hit, perhaps even a so-called ‘banger’” to open the campaign, before promising that “the deeper cuts will follow,” and that tension between immediacy and depth is the thread worth tugging at across the album’s fifty-four minutes.

Album number ten, he says, was about honouring their history “while also introducing some new nuances,” which is about as honest a summary of a veteran band’s balancing act as you are likely to read. The early records: In The Halls Of Awaiting, Since The Day It All Came Down and Above The Weeping World – were rooted firmly in the 90s Scandinavian school, all frosted riffs and grief-stricken lyricism, before Across The Dark and One For Sorrow opened the door to cleaner vocals and broader dynamics. Shadows Of The Dying Sun refined the formula, Winter’s Gate blew it up into a single continuous epic, and Heart Like A Grave and Anno 1696 pulled in heavier, folkier and more cinematic textures. Netherworlds, in that light, reads like a band taking stock: less a reinvention than a distillation, gathering the threads of a long career and weaving them into something deliberately dreamlike.

A CURVEBALL OPENER

The Cold Song opens proceedings with a genuine curveball: a reworking of Henry Purcell’s aria from the 1691 semi-opera King Arthur, in which the Cold Genius is roused, shivering, from his frozen sleep. Rock audiences may know it best from Klaus Nomi’s eerie interpretation, and at just over two minutes, it looks set to serve as a prologue rather than a showpiece and an apt one, too, for an album preoccupied with sleep, winter and the reluctant passing of time. Opening a tenth melodic death metal album with a seventeenth-century English art song is a quietly audacious move, and a telling sign of a band still willing to surprise.

Shadowlife is where the album truly starts, and Vanhala’s mission statement has clearly been fulfilled. It is the band at their most direct – a hook-led anthem in which the clean refrain does the heavy lifting and the growled verses provide the ballast. It wears its catchiness on its sleeve, as promised, but the lyric gives it more depth than a straightforward single needs, Sevanen leaving us, in his words, “suspended between longing and acceptance.” Coldstore Productions’ accompanying video fits the bill neatly, and as an opening calling card for the era it is hard to fault.

CLASSIC INSOMNIUM SPIRIT

Remembrance follows, and a title like that from this band rarely heralds anything cheerful. Placed directly after the most accessible song on the record, it looks set to be the first move inward, towards the memory-haunted introspection Insomnium do better than almost anyone, and I would expect it to lean on the dual-lead interplay that has long been their signature. On sequencing alone, it looks like the moment the record takes a breath and glances backwards, and Insomnium tend to be at their most affecting when they do exactly that.

Gleam In The Black is the sprinter of the pack. Sevanen bills it as “one of the faster songs on the new album,” built to “get the crowd moving when played live,” and it delivers precisely that – a surging, driving piece with “a classic Insomnium spirit” to match. Lyrically, it is a love story steeped in the uncanny, a restless nocturnal hunt for something long gone, and its title comes from the image Sevänen describes as “that single gleam of light amidst the blackness.” Patric Ullaeus, a familiar hand behind the camera for the scene, directed the video, and the result is moody and handsomely shot. It is the most old-school moment of the three singles and all the better for it.

THE CENTREPIECE

The Hour Grows Late is the album’s centrepiece in every sense: eight minutes long, sitting at the heart of the running order, and featuring three members of fellow Finnish titans Amorphis – vocalist Tomi Joutsen, guitarist Tomi Koivusaari and keyboardist Santeri Kallio – with Joutsen lending his voice to the track. That is quite a guest list, and a fitting one given the two bands’ shared lineage and the joint touring plans now being rolled out on both sides of the Atlantic.

With Koivusaari’s own history behind the mic in the earliest days of Amorphis, there is real potential here for a genuine meeting of generations, and it is the track I am most curious to hear. At eight minutes, it is also the longest song on the album, and Insomnium have long been at their best when they give themselves room – recall the multi-part sprawl of Winter’s Gate, where patience rather than punch did the heavy lifting.

ARCH OF THE SKY

Arch Of The Sky, the third single, is the boldest of the lot. Drawing on Sámi folklore, it pictures celestial hunters forever pursuing a deer across the heavens; should they ever bring it down, the sky caves in and everything ends, so the hunt can never be allowed to finish. Friman describes it as introducing “a proggier side” to the album, “featuring time signature changes,” and it lives up to that billing, the rhythm section shifting the ground beneath the melody, so the song never quite settles where you expect it to. Ullaeus is back behind the camera, pairing the band’s performance with traditional animation, and the mythic material suits the band’s storytelling instincts perfectly. If Shadowlife is the hit, this is the one that shows where Insomnium might still go.

Pathways Of The Night brings the second half into view at just under five minutes. Its title sits squarely within the album’s nocturnal vocabulary, and on a record so preoccupied with the hours between dusk and dawn, I would wager it continues the journey through that half-lit world rather than breaking the spell – a connective tissue track, perhaps, though Insomnium have a knack for slipping their strongest moments into exactly those spaces. Coming straight after the most rhythmically restless song on the record, it may also serve as a breather of sorts before the final descent.

DIFFERENT TEXTURES

Ethereal Sleep is the most on-the-nose title in the track list given everything Sevanen has said about lingering in “the liminal spaces of sleep, shadow, and night.” At over five and a half minutes, it has room to breathe, and I would expect it to showcase the band’s softer, more spacious side, the acoustic textures and shared clean vocals that have become an increasingly important colour in their palette since Friman first stepped up to the mic.

The Banished hints at something harder-edged. Exile and rejection are not new themes for Insomnium, but a title this blunt, arriving this late, suggests the album might bare its teeth one last time before the close. It would make tactical sense: a jolt of aggression to stop the final stretch from drifting too far into reverie.

Journey’s End closes the standard edition at almost seven minutes, and Insomnium closers have a habit of being where the emotional weight finally lands. After a record so concerned with things that cannot be held on to, a final track named for arrival or ending feels pointed. If it follows the band’s best tradition, expect a slow-building finale that leaves the listener lingering in silence once the last chord fades.

BONUS TRACKS

For those who want more, three bonus tracks are available on selected editions – Fading Aurora, Netherworld and Severed Blooms and the fact that the near-title track has been relegated to bonus status speaks volumes about the quality control applied here. When a band leaves a song named after the album off the main sequence, either the cut is weak or the album is strong enough to absorb the loss; with this band, the safer bet is the latter.

What Netherworlds does best is restate Insomnium’s strengths without merely repeating them. The three singles, taken together, cover a deliberately widespread range: the anthemic, the galloping and the progressive, and each one sounds like the same band approaching the same melancholy from a different angle. That is no small feat ten albums in, when plenty of their peers have either calcified into self-parody or wandered so far from their roots that the old fans have stopped following.

It also helps that Sevänen remains one of the most quietly gifted lyricists in the genre. Where much of melodic death metal settles for generic gloom, his writing is literate and specific, rooted in the Finnish landscape: long winters, dark forests, lakes under ice – and in a very Nordic acceptance of impermanence. His line about love, youth, summer, and warmth being impossible to preserve forever could serve as a mission statement for the band’s entire catalogue, and Netherworlds looks like the record on which that theme is pushed furthest into the foreground. Heard that way, the decision to abandon a single storyline makes sense: these songs are less chapters than variations on one feeling, viewed from slightly different hours of the night.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MELODIES

There are, of course, questions only a full listen can settle. Melodic death metal of this kind lives and dies by its melodies, and over fifty-plus minutes, the line between hypnotic and samey can be a thin one; Insomnium have occasionally strayed across it before. The loss of Liimatainen’s voice and pen is also not nothing, and whether Laisto brings a distinctive new flavour or simply fills the gap neatly will become clearer once the deeper cuts Vanhala promised are out in the open. And while dropping the short-story framework frees the band from the demands of plot, it also removes the narrative propulsion that made Winter’s Gate and Anno 1696 feel like events rather than simply albums.

But on the evidence so far, Netherworlds sounds like a band who know precisely who they are and are still curious about who else they might be. A tenth album that leads with a confessed banger, follows it with a classic-sounding gallop, and then gambles on odd meters and Sámi myth is not the work of a band coasting towards retirement. Whether it ultimately stands alongside Shadows Of The Dying Sun and Winter’s Gate in the upper tier of their catalogue is a verdict that the full record will deliver, but for now, the lights are dimmed, the night is long, and Insomnium remain the finest company you could ask for in it.

Insomnium: Website

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