ALBUM REVIEW: Fire In Heaven – The Nightmares

Welsh noir pop band THE NIGHTMARES have a flair for the gothic, and their sophomore album Fire In Heaven is no exception. Casting their bewitching aesthetic across the album, synths are paired with ruminations on lost love, existentialism and anxiety, offering an other-worldy exploration of the human condition.  

Opening track Siren Song finds THE NIGHTMARES laying the benchmarks of Fire In Heaven out in the open. Celestial lyrics, synth melodies and upbeat indie pop beats all come out swinging on Fire In Heaven. Following track Something In The Dark offers the other side of the coin. Melodies turn moodier and celestial images turn into other worldly atmospheres, turning into a swirling alien call. 

THE NIGHTMARES’ artistic vision could not be clearer: this is a world of paranormal, gothic and other-worldly images utilised to express varying emotional currents. The jangly guitars beneath Dead Roses lift the track into one of the high points of the album. Exploring the anxieties that come with being transported back into vulnerable memories. Eleanor Coburn’s vocals come to the forefront for the first time on the album, working on the second verse alongside Adam Parslow’s to transport the song into a dreamy ethereal space.  

This lighter and janglier sound remains steady. Letting It All Go and Hell Is Gonna Happen maintain the synth driven pop with a tint of sparklier guitar riffs that characterise the album. Their hooks are catchy, but begin to find the album not quite delivering on its aesthetic promises as they never quite reach further into the heart of their emotional threads. 

The world-building at the core of Fire In Heaven finds gothic imagery weaving through each moment of the album. Moments like the gnarly intensity of the opening guitar riff on Beneath Your Name suggest a desire to build to something larger and more dramatic. The track twists out of the album’s otherwise jangly nature, adding to its fixation on death and decay in a really interesting and haunting way. Winterlude finds an equally haunting piano interlude allowing the album a moment to breathe and truly create an atmosphere. Equally on Blood On Your Hands, where Eleanor Coburn’s hauntingly light vocals take centre stage to condemn animal slaughter, THE NIGHTMARES are crafting a gut-wrenching experience that finds artistic vision melding compellingly with a sonic narrative. 

Yet, despite these moments where it feels as if they push this atmospheric importance, THE NIGHTMARES never quite find their footing in this, and Fire In Heaven never quite becomes more than a sum of its parts. Vampiric aesthetics and witchy melodies become slightly predictable, and just as THE NIGHTMARES appear to be introducing a new element to dig that little bit deeper, they return back to what they know. By the time Run Away hits, THE NIGHTMARES don’t seem to be packing the heightened emotional punch that their noirish aesthetic could. 

Final two tracks Heaven Won’t Hold Me and Melancholy Waltz delve into despair, dejection and regret, and offer a sense of honest vulnerability that peeks through any guise of a drive to conjure an aesthetic. Melancholy Waltz builds to a climactic end, and tops the album off with an ethereal and grand close, offering perhaps that extra push that the sound needed to reach throughout the album. 

Fire In Heaven has a lot to offer in the way of upbeat goth-tinged indie pop earworms. Yet, it never delves further than this. Thematic threads of existentialism, melancholy and anxiety fail to pack a punch behind the veil of a gothic aesthetic that never seems to push at the heart of itself. In the glimpses of this that are amidst the album however, THE NIGHTMARES deliver bewitching, if brief, looks into the depths of their psyche and vision as a band.

Rating: 6/10

Fire In Heaven is out now via Venn Records.

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