Metal
The Gathering have released “Echoes Of Mandylion”, a sixteen-track live album recorded across five shows at Doornroosje in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from 27 to 31 August 2025. It features the “Mandylion” line-up, with singer Anneke van Giersbergen, who had not stood on a stage with them for eleven years. It is out digitally and, for now, exclusively on Bandcamp.
All eight songs from “Mandylion”, the 1995 album whose thirtieth anniversary the shows mark, are there, along with eight more: “On Most Surfaces (Inuit)”, “Broken Glass”, “Waking Hour”, “Great Ocean Road”, “Probably Built In The Fifties”, “Analog Park”, “Travel” and “Saturnine”.
Asked whether they had expected the record to land like this three decades on, Van Giersbergen says: “Really, honestly, no. We know that people still listen to the album, still listen to The Gathering, and they follow us around, but we didn’t expect this to happen.”
The reunion came out of a few coffees with guitarist René Rutten. “We just had coffee a few times, and we talked about life and about everything, and about music, as friends,” she explains. “And he said, ‘Maybe now is the time to do something special.’ And then I said, ‘Yeah, why not? Let’s do one show. Let’s do two shows, maybe.’”
They ended up with five without meaning to. The first two dates sold out in a minute, the venue’s server went down, and Doornroosje added the Wednesday and then the Sunday: inside twenty minutes there were five sold-out nights. “We said, okay, well, we keep it like this because now it’s really special,” Van Giersbergen explains.
The anniversary run ends on 16 January 2027 at AFAS Live in Amsterdam. Van Giersbergen says there are no plans to make new music with the band: “We didn’t talk about it.”
Text by Roger Estivill