Metal
“Netherworlds”, Insomnium’s tenth studio album, comes out next Friday, 16 October, on Century Media. It is their first since “Anno 1696” (2023), and the label frames it as the start of a new chapter: producer and engineer Miiro Varjus, the note says, became the band’s closest creative confidant. It was finished at Fascination Street Studios, with Jens Bogren mixing and Tony Lindgren mastering.
Guitarist Markus Vanhala has described the record as a dream world halfway between two places, where the dead who were close to you —and the family pets— come back while you sleep.
The album holds the first cover version they have ever released, “The Cold Song” —from Purcell’s “King Arthur”— and features a new guitarist, Tomy Laisto.
“It’s a thematic gateway to the entire record, an elegy not only for a lost beloved, but also for the fading belief that anything beautiful can remain untouched by time,” singer and bassist Niilo Sevänen says of “Shadowlife”, the first single.
The Catalan date is already set: on 9 February 2027 they play Sala Apolo in Barcelona as part of Amorphis’s Borderland Tour, with Unto Others opening. The European run goes from 22 January in Hamburg to 14 February in Tilburg, and the day after Barcelona it stops at La Riviera in Madrid.
Text by Roger Estivill