Some places only ache once you have left them, and others you leave because they ache. Shores Of Null have built an entire record in the space between the two.
HOMESICK
Some places only ache once you have left them, and others you leave because they ache. Shores Of Null have built an entire record in the space between the two. The Italians have spent thirteen years carving out one of the more distinctive corners of European doom, where Finnish-school melodic death-doom, old-world gothic grandeur and a streak of blackened grit sit in the same cold room. Along the way, they have played Hellfest, Rock Imperium and 70000 Tons Of Metal, shared stages with Swallow The Sun, Draconian and Avatarium, and earned a reputation as a band that rarely makes the same album twice. Homesick is full-length number five.
Where its most ambitious predecessor was organised around one vast idea, Homesick is organised around a single slippery word. Straccione calls the album “an exploration of the deeply ambiguous nature of ‘home’ somewhere that can shelter and wound in equal measure, a refuge that also stores the memories you would rather not revisit.” Yearning, grief, rage, fragility and the need to belong all feed into it, and the frontman is clear about how it should be heard, insisting the record “is meant to be experienced as a whole rather than as a collection of separate songs.” For a band that once released an album consisting of a single thirty-eight-minute track, this reads less like a new ambition than an old instinct reasserting itself.
OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE
The five-piece that made The Loss Of Beauty remain the same: Straccione and Giaccari alongside guitarist Raffaele Colace, bassist Matteo Capozucca, and drummer Emiliano Cantiano. Behind the desk is Marco “Cinghio” Mastrobuono, who recorded, mixed and mastered the album at Bloom Recording Studios and steered a lengthy stretch of pre-production. He is hardly a stranger, having added guitars and bass to Beyond The Shores, and the band credit him with giving them “a valuable outside perspective” precisely because he knows their sound so well. The supporting cast is quietly impressive too: Natalie Koskinen of Finnish funeral doom stalwarts Shape Of Despair, My Dying Bride violinist Shaun MacGowan, pianist Lorenzo Fiorentini, and double bassist Fabio Gabbianelli, a familiar name from earlier sessions.
Sonically, Straccione is keen to stress both continuity and change. “Those who have followed Shores Of Null from the very beginning know that our influences touch many genres,” he says, adding that Homesick “brings something fresh to the band, without compromising our sound.” The most obvious shift is structural. Ten tracks across forty-seven and a half minutes, with nothing longer than six minutes and change, makes this a far cry from the single-track sprawl of Beyond The Shores. The stated goal was something immersive, with songs “that can hit hard in the moment,” and that tension between the single that grabs you and the album that swallows you whole is the one worth following across the record.
HONEST REPRESENTATION
Quiescence (2014) and Black Drapes For Tomorrow (2017) set out the stall, heavy and melodic in equal measure, with Straccione moving between harsh and clean delivery. Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying) followed in 2020, a single-track meditation on mortality with guests including Swallow The Sun’s Mikko Kotamäki and Thomas AG Jensen of Saturnus. The Loss Of Beauty arrived in 2023 but was largely written and recorded between 2017 and 2019, and last year’s Latitudes Of Sorrow split with Finnish duo Convocation added three more songs to the catalogue. Seen that way, Homesick is the first full-length in some time that captures the band entirely in the present tense, which goes some way to explaining Straccione’s claim that it is “probably the most honest representation of who Shores Of Null are today.”
Allies Before Defeat opens proceedings at just over four and a half minutes, and the band say it was always destined to be the opener. Written by bassist Matteo Capozucca, it pairs a surge of energy with a melancholic undertow, its lyric dwelling on love, support, suffering, and separation – the people who stand beside us until, one day, they cannot. Both Quiescence and Black Drapes For Tomorrow opened with short instrumental pieces, so beginning with a full song is a small but telling signal that this album means business from the first bar.
AGGRESSIVE MELODIES
Two Mountains is, by Straccione’s own reckoning, “probably the catchiest song we’ve ever written,” and he reckons it has what it takes to become a live staple. It is also one of the most personal stories on the album, drawn from the Legend of Maja, a folk tale from his home region of Abruzzo. Fleeing across the sea with her wounded son, the nymph searches the snowbound peaks for healing herbs in vain. When he dies, she lies down beside him and is consumed by grief, the pair becoming the Majella massif and the sleeping giant of the Gran Sasso. He calls it “a story about a mother’s love and the unbearable pain of loss,” and placing a hook-led single on top of a myth about the landscape of home is about as on-theme as an album can get.
Bleed To Life is the one that band bill it as one of their most aggressive yet melodic songs to date. The title flips “bleed to death” on its head, and the lyric is about finding life through pain, the old wounds treated as something to make peace with rather than flee from.
Homesick, the title track, is where the whole thing started. Straccione confirms it was the first song written for the album and that “in many ways it set the emotional direction” for what follows. While Colace came up with its opening riff on the road with Swallow The Sun in 2023, which feels fitting for a song about distance. As the record’s emotional compass, it is the one by which the rest will be judged.
SON OF THE TIDE
Son Of The Tide sets heavy, growl-led verses against a chorus that opens out into something enormous. Straccione describes the tide as “a metaphor for the forces that push and pull us through life,” and the lyric turns on solitude and the roads handed down to us rather than picked for ourselves, its narrator finally giving up the swim against the current and settling into an uneasy truce with fate.
Dreaming Of A Scar is where Shaun MacGowan’s violin comes to the fore, opening the song alongside piano. The band place it somewhere between melodic death metal and gothic rock, and lyrically it sets childhood against adulthood, a plea to hold on to some of the wonder of being young. Anyone who has spent time with My Dying Bride knows how much heartache that violin can carry, and on an album about home, a song about the first home we all leave behind makes perfect sense.
Society Is The Murderer is the bluntest title on the album, but it is not the bludgeon it appears to be. The band describe it as one of their most unusual songs, built on unconventional ideas and arrangements and sung entirely clean, a bold call for a band whose identity rests on the tug between growl and melody. Its target is a culture that worships success, and its argument is for the right to fail, making it the most outward-looking lyric on the record.
THE NUMBING VOID
The Numbing Void is the longest track at just over six minutes and the one I am most eager to hear. Natalie Koskinen’s voice has been a defining part of Shape Of Despair’s sound for years, MacGowan returns on violin, and the band frame it as a successor in spirit to Beyond The Shores, leaning hardest into death-doom. Its subject – grief, mortality and regret for time that cannot be won back – puts it squarely in that record’s lineage. If the album has a centrepiece in the old-fashioned, hold-your-breath sense, this looks like it.
Another Breath is the shortest track at under four minutes, and anyone expecting a breather after the slow, inward pull of The Numbing Void is in for a jolt. The band promise abrasive energy and recurring blast beats, with a lyric rooted in anxiety, loneliness, and the grinding sameness of modern life. Disappear then closes the record at around four and a half minutes. For an album so preoccupied with belonging, ending on a song about vanishing feels pointed, though the band frame it around loss, surrender, and acceptance, with a chorus built for one last singalong – an ending that lets go rather than leaves things hanging.
What Homesick appears to do best is sharpen Shores Of Null without sanding them down. The four singles cover a deliberately widespread – the folk-rooted anthem, the bruising lead single, the title track’s emotional anchor, and the dramatic swell of Son Of The Tide – and each sounds like the same band approaching the same ache from a different direction.
A DEEPER WEIGHT
It also helps that Straccione is writing from somewhere specific. Drawing on Abruzzo folklore, a riff written on the road, and an idea of belonging that cuts both ways give these songs a sense of place that a lot of their peers lack. Heard that way, the shift to shorter songs makes sense: these are less chapters in one story than snapshots of the same feeling taken from different angles.
There are, naturally, questions only a full listen can settle. Four of the ten tracks have been shared ahead of release, so the deeper cuts carry real weight. Shorter songs also leave less room for the slow-burning patience that made Beyond The Shores so absorbing, and there is a fine line between concise and constrained. And while guests of Koskinen and MacGowan’s calibre are a coup, the test is whether they add new colour or simply decorate songs that would stand up perfectly well without them.
Homesick sounds like a band who know exactly who they are and are still asking where they belong. A record that opens with a bassist’s song about love and separation, hangs its catchiest moment on a mountain myth, sings one track entirely clean and drops blast beats into its closing stretch is not the work of a band playing it safe. Whether it stands as their finest hour is a verdict the full record will deliver, but for now, the tide is turning, and Shores Of Null sound more at home in their own skin than ever.
Shores of Null: Website