Ascension

Paradise Lost's seventeenth album came out on Nuclear Blast on 19 September 2025 as NBR 6879-2, five years after Obsidian. According to the band's own biography, Gregor Mackintosh produced it at Black Planet Studios in East Yorkshire, with the drums and vocals recorded at NBS and Wasteland studios in Sweden. There are ten songs; Lawrence Mackrory mastered it, and the cover uses a painting by George Frederick Watts. The same biography walks through the record. The opener, "Serpent on the Cross", starts on a doom riff and halfway through shifts into classic heavy metal driven by double bass drums. On "Silence Like the Grave" Nick Holmes sings about the pointlessness of war; "Lay a Wreath Upon the World" begins as a quiet elegy and builds to a mournful climax; and the closer, "The Precipice", opens on piano. The drums are played by Guido Montanarini, who became a full member in March 2023 and left in May 2025, before the album was out; Jeff Singer, the band's drummer from 2004 to 2008, returned in his place. Ward Records issued the Japanese edition the same day as GQCS-91664. The track list here is the album's ten; the player on this page carries twelve, adding the bonus tracks "This Stark Town" and "A Life Unknown".