Paradise Lost: Soundtrack To Salvation
“All of a sudden something snapped in my head, and I was outside my body watching myself,” recalls Gregor Mackintosh, describing a traumatic experience that occurred just over a year ago. “And then it became a feeling, and then I had this for about a month or two where I was bulletproof, you know, I was watching myself in the third person.” It’s an intensely personal revelation that most would keep private, but for PARADISE LOST’s lead guitarist, that moment of dissociation became the foundation for the band’s seventeenth album, Ascension. The title, he explains, represents something far more complex than simple upward movement; it’s about the different ways cultures interpret transcendence, whether as psychological crisis or spiritual awakening.
To understand how PARADISE LOST arrived at this profound artistic statement, you have to rewind five years. Since 2020’s critically acclaimed Obsidian, Mackintosh hasn’t been idle, quite the opposite. He’s been exploring the outer limits of his creativity through multiple projects, each serving a specific purpose in his artistic ecosystem. “I did this album with STRIGOI, very extreme, very terrifying type stuff, and then I did the HOST project which was more electronic, and it’s like a barometer, then in the middle, in the core of this, is roughly what PARADISE LOST is.”
Between STRIGOI’s blackened extremity, HOST’s melancholic electronics, the retrospective exercise of Icon 30, these weren’t just side projects, they were essential research missions. Each venture helped Mackintosh triangulate exactly where PARADISE LOST belonged in 2025’s musical landscape. “It’s just about keeping busy, it’s always sad or dark music, and exploring the different facets of that.”
But even with that clarity, Ascension nearly didn’t happen. “With this new record, about three years ago I had half the record written, and something was niggling me, and it just wouldn’t go away, and I ended up scrapping the whole lot and taking a whole year out off songwriting completely,” he reveals. It’s the kind of artistic courage that separates lifers from pretenders, the willingness to bin months of work because your instincts say it’s not right. “It’s all about the excitement for me. If I’m not super excited by something, then there’s not much point and I’ve got to go back to the drawing board.”
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source. “When we did the Icon 30 record, it kickstarted the inspiration again, and I thought, ah, this is where I want to be.” Revisiting their 1993 classic didn’t just refresh old glories, it reminded Mackintosh what PARADISE LOST sounded like when everything clicked. That renewed excitement led to a creative approach rooted in the band’s early-90s output.
“I started with a track called Diluvium, and I was trying to do something a little more riff-oriented, but then incorporate lots of church-like melodies, in the way that I would have done on Shades Of God, which is an unsung album I think, because it falls between our Gothic album and our Icon album, which are both way more revered.”
The real eureka moment came with Serpent On The Cross, when a melody Mackintosh had originally envisioned as a vocal line transformed into the album’s musical DNA.
“I’d sung it into the song, which is a melody that goes and I just thought, that’s real ear worm, that’s real catchy. And I tried to get Nick to do it on vocal, and he said it just sounds like a guitar part.” Sometimes the best creative decisions are the ones that feel inevitable in hindsight. That guitar melody became the thread connecting Ascension’s ten tracks, creating what Mackintosh describes as “intertwining church-like melodies that just saturate the album almost.”
With the songwriting flowing again, Mackintosh made another significant decision: to self-produce the album for the first time, sort of.
“All that’s changed on this record is the name, calling me producer on this, it puts a little more pressure on your shoulders, but it’s essentially not much different to what I’ve done for the last few records,” he explains. The decision to cut out the middleman paid dividends in both efficiency and authenticity. “I just felt it was time where I don’t really need to tell someone anymore how to get this sound, or that sound, cause it just seems to take twice as long as it needs to, because I know what to do and how to get it.”
His hands-on approach extended to unconventional recording techniques that prioritised character over clinical perfection. “I approached the miking of the drums differently to anything we’ve done. I did it in the same way we would have done at a live gig in the late eighties, and by that I mean I took the bottom heads off all the toms and mic’d inside the toms, and the engineer thought I was insane, but it worked.”
“I don’t want it to sound like a modern metal album. I want it to sound good, obviously, and as nice to listen to as possible, but I didn’t want all the character ironed out by trying to be perfect, because a lot of the character of sounds are imperfections,” he reflects. Mackintosh‘s approach reflects a broader frustration with modern metal’s obsession with polishing everything in production.
“I still consume music in a similar way to how I did when I first started listening to music. I still ravagely search for something that excites me,” he explains, but admits the hunt is increasingly difficult. “It’s hard to find a band these days that is consistent, that’s the annoying thing. You’ll hear a couple of tracks, and you think, oh yes, this is gonna be my new favourite band, and then there’s nothing else.”
This meticulous attention to craft extends to their songwriting collaboration, where Nick Holmes‘ vocal versatility becomes a secret weapon. “When we write stuff these days, I’m very fortunate to have a vocalist like Nick that has these three or four distinct styles to draw upon, because you can try each style out over various different parts of the song, and blend to taste and see what works,” Mackintosh explains. That collaborative spirit reached its peak during the Swedish recording sessions, when a spontaneous phone call brought PRIMORDIAL’s Alan Averill into the studio to add vocals to Salvation within thirty minutes.
The album’s architecture reveals PARADISE LOST’s deep respect for the medium itself. “We definitely think about albums in terms of A and B sides, because that’s what we grew up on,” Mackintosh says, acknowledging that this approach might seem quaint in the streaming era. But for a band who’ve always treated albums as complete statements, the philosophy remains essential. “As much as the dynamics of a song within a song matter, like the ebbs and flows, and peaks and troughs within a song, it’s the same for an album’s running order.”
Mackintosh‘s ultimate goal for Ascension is all about the journey it soundtracks. “Most of it was written around autumn/winter last year, and as we got into the thick of the songwriting, I realised that I wanted it to embody this feeling of autumn/winter, of like walking through misty fields on an autumn morning or a crisp winter’s day.” That seasonal atmosphere reaches its peak on Salvation, Mackintosh‘s personal favourite and the album’s longest track. “I just like things that sound church-like, cathedral-like, especially on that song; I tried to make it really evocative of autumn, winter, Christmas time, you know, there’s even sleigh bells on it for fuck sake, which no one’s really noticed,” he laughs. You know times they-are-a-changing when gothic metal’s most miserable practitioners start sneaking Christmas joy into their darkness.
He references Fountains Abbey, where he walks with his son, and Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose, spaces where history, spirituality, and melancholy converge. “I’ve always listened to music in a very visual way,” he explains, recalling teenage conversations where others heard heaviness and he heard “a storm coming in over the horizon.”
Which brings us full circle to that moment of personal crisis that inspired the album’s title. “At the time I was in a therapy group, and I went to it, and all these guys sit around and you talk about stuff,” Mackintosh recalls. Different people offered wildly different interpretations of his experience, from religious awakenings to chemical imbalances. “In Western society, it’s probably a psychological term, I think it’s something like dissociative disorder, so it seems a bad thing, but in a lot of cultures and sections of societies, it’s seen as a good thing, like enlightenment or nirvana, you know, you’re achieving a pinnacle of something.”
After 37 years and the longest gap in their career, PARADISE LOST have transformed personal crisis and creative doubt into something transcendent. Ascension proves that veteran bands can still surprise themselves, finding new depths in familiar territories. For a group who’ve spent nearly four decades exploring the darker corners of human experience, it suggests the journey toward whatever lies beyond is far from over.
Ascension is set for release on September 19th via Nuclear Blast Records. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS124 here:
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