“And I Keep The Dream to Forgive”: Moonspell‘s Far from God
“Learn to forget.”
On Friday, July 3, Portuguese legends Moonspell return with their 14th studio album Far from God via Napalm Records, a romantic and melancholic record that thrives in the stripping away of the grand adornments and ornaments of past records. There is, of course, a healthy amount of synths on the album, but unlike previous records, they do not overwhelm with bombast or distract with an overly-symphonic pomp. It is a sleek, guitar-driven record given over to considerations of distance, of what was and might be, of the spaces between, and of the relationship of conflicting or adversarial forces. Billed as an album invested in “Baudelairian love, existential guilt, and redemption,” and as “an album that will truly save Gothic Metal from boredom and predictability,” Far from God is a record that finds a band in its 34th year of existence still challenging itself. Invoking Baudelaire, we must first turn to “To The Reader” and find there “One creature only is most foul and false,” a creature who “willingly would devastate the earth / And in own yawning swallow all the world.” “He is,” of course, “Ennui!” Can, then, Moonspell after all these years, beat back “this dainty creature” capable of engulfing us all in weariness, discontent, and boredom?
In short, yes! It is a surprisingly and refreshingly invigorated album. From the first moments of second single and opening track “Cross Your Heart,” long-time fans and those new to the band will be surprised at the vigorous and spirited post-black/blackgaze riffing that shows that while the days of Lionheart’s melodic black metal might be well in the rear-view, Moonspell still understands what counts for beauty in the genre. The infectious, nearly Alcestian riff gives way to a fist-bumping, lip-sneering Sisters of Mercy postpunk motif. “Markers and saints,” “roses and thorns,” “master and slave,” are all there in their dialectical relationships, in their dusty and gravebound mortality. Paired with lead single and titular track “Far from God,” the two songs call to mind the breakout success of Cemetery Skyline, as the latter is Sisters of Mercy by-way-of Type O Negative. At our most distant (“far from God”), we are at our most intimate (“but close to you I feel / full of life”). This ode to vampirism, one that returns us to Baudelaire—“Your kisses would waken again / Your vampire lover’s corpse!”—treats with a dignified solemnity its gothic themes of tragedy, mystique, and the “quiet nobility of creatures of the night.” Calling also to mind “Funeral Bloom” from 2015’s Extinct, this opening dyad is as beguiling and catchy as the band has maybe ever been.
Later in the record, “For the Love of Mortals” captures best this new sense of blackgaze-infused gothic metal. Employing delicate synths to give the song a crestfallen warmth, “For the Love of Mortals” seduces you into losing yourself in the song’s gossamer reveries of an impossible love. Darker and slower than “Cross Your Heart” and “Far from God,” the song is nevertheless a triumph of tension and release, of taking up an impassable distance, cherishing it, and finding in that space a heartbreaking eros. “I loved you so, like only a mortal could do / I went as far to be with you, as I could.” Here, the auxiliary “could” supplements or even attempts to make up for what was not possible, an apologia in the form of a love letter lost. It is a meditation on a “Remorse after Death.” As Baudelaire writes, it is “[t]he Tomb, who knows what yearning is about.”
Yearning, desire, and hope animate so much of Far from God. In “Biblical,”—the song that sounds most like late-’90s Moonspell or even Eternal-era Samael without any of the industrial miscues—“Our love was… full of drama, full of hope.” In “The Great Wolf in the Sky,” a song bolstered and haunted by the string accompaniment of Alica Nuhro, we are directed to “Stop and listen—there is hope, follow me.” Like “Your Promise of Light,” “Our Freedom to Fall,” and “Reconquista,” “The Great Wolf in the Sky” is where the band also leverages its heavier, doomier past. Fernando Ribeiro’s unmistakable harsh vocals roar over big riffs cooked up by Ricardo Amorim and Pedro Paixão. In “The Great Wolf in the Sky” and “Your Promise of Light,” these erupt as great pronouncements of emotional ejaculation. In “Our Freedom to Fall” and “Reconquista,” the two songs that close Far from God, the band’s heaviness is a mainstay. “Our Freedom to Fall” opens with something like AFI playing alternative rock in the early 2000s before turning to a palm-muted pounding. The one song that initially turned me off, I was won back over by the middle of the song with the album’s thickest, heaviest riff. Ribeiro’s vocals get almost cavernous as the band reaches back into its own catacombs. Final track “Reconquista” might similarly turn off or seduce listeners with its heavier, alt-metal riffs, but it finds recourse to the slickest solo of the entire album to break up the track and give way to a delightfully self-referential conclusion: “Under the moon—at the gates of Heaven. Under the spell—under the moon. Under the spell.” An appropriately hypnotic riff undergirds this final incantation, a trance-like end to an album of dark magic and darker intrigue.
In the album’s artwork, painted beautifully by Eliran Kantor, a kiss is shared through a window. The image—and who is interior and who is exterior to the window—cannot but call to mind all the vampires flying around Far from God. Where the top frame should be, though, is a hovering blade attached to a rope that is seemingly held taut behind the back of the person in purple, turning the scene into one of the waiting guillotines and even inverting our presumption of who is mortal and who is not, who is in control and who is under a spell. The spectre of death, the crossing of boundaries, the liminality of love are all present in this image and on Far from God. It’s an album whose eroticism is infused if not inflamed by imagining what can or cannot be. “I love you as I love the night’s high vault / O silent one, o sorrow’s lachrymal,” begins the 24th poem in The Flowers of Evil, which ends with the speaker cherishing “your unbending cruelty, / This iciness so beautiful to me.” What makes Far from God such an effective piece of gothic metal is, for all the corpses and grotesqueries of Baudelaire’s poems and their influence on the band, Moonspell’s ability to unearth or disinter their own erotic revelry is no less pleasurable for its coyness and subtlety.
4/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Far from God arrives Friday, July 3, 2026,
via Napalm Records.
Lots of merch to be had.
