Inside the Making of Ascension: Paradise Lost’s Studio Process and Lyrical Vision

More than three decades into their career, and with over two million albums sold, PARADISE LOST remain the undisputed kings of metal’s dark side. Formed in Halifax in 1988, the band quickly became noted as the pioneers of gothic metal through their early groundbreaking albums like 1991’s aptly-titled Gothic, a mixture of heaviness intertwined with shadowy melody and atmosphere.

Never a group to remain creatively static, across their career they’ve explored a myriad of avenues of dark music, from sludgy doom-death roots, to conquering the metal mainstream with the enormous, lush sounds of 1995’s Draconian Times, to more experimental, electronic leanings, leaving an influence on a trail of artists as varied as CRADLE OF FILTH, HIM, GATECREEPER and CHELSEA WOLFE.

Now, in 2025, the Yorkshire quintet return with their staggering seventeenth album, Ascension, a record that sees their crown continue to gleam as it underlines just how they attained their position. Produced by guitarist Gregor Mackintosh at Black Planet studios in East Yorkshire, with drums and vocals captured at NBS and Wasteland studios in Sweden, its ten tracks traverse the multitude of sounds in the band’s arsenal, from full-bore heavy metal to sky-high melody, all the while keeping a minor-key melancholy that remains irresistible. Guitarist Gregor Mackintosh talks to Hi Fi Way about the album.

Congratulations on the album, are you thrilled with how it turned out?
Yeah, I think so. Well, I say I think so, it’s because we’re in a bit of a period between finishing your record, delivering it to the label, and then it coming out. It’s about three months or more, maybe four months. You second-guess yourself for those four months, pretty much, so… I’m excited for it to come out so that I don’t have to second-guess myself anymore.

Is that because you’re so attached to the songs, especially after nearly five years between albums?
Kind of, because it’s out of your hands then, you’ve delivered it. There’s no moving parts anymore from your end. Everything’s set in stone. So, you can’t listen to it and go, oh, I’ll just tweak that, or I’ll do that, that’s not an option anymore, so you just put it out there and also, you start to think, is any of this any good anymore? Just because you’ve lived with it for so long. It’s perfectly normal, because it happens every time we do a record. But it changes slightly, because obviously the world around you shifts, the scenes change, so you don’t know how relevant you’re going to be because we do our own thing, stick to our guns, see what we like at the time, and just do that, and then you just throw it out there and see what happens. It might hit the right spot, hit the right note in the right scene at the right time. Or it might miss, you never know.

Does that make it harder to listen to the album like a fan would, without critiquing it?
I had to leave it a couple of months after finishing it before I could hear it again because I’d been working on it for a year, solidly, with pretty much no gaps and then it was like you are unable to listen to it like a fan would. So I took a couple of months out, and then I listened back to it right before the first single came out. I thought, yep, that does exactly what we want it to do. We couldn’t have done any more than that. It gives you the right feeling that we wanted to convey and that’s what our music’s all about, our music’s escapism and it’s about listening to it and picturing a scene, and putting you in that scene. I think it’s achieved that. If it achieves it for us, I mean, it’s all subjective, I suppose. But yeah, from my point of view, I couldn’t have done any more, I don’t think.

As the process drags on, do you start worrying whether you’ll ever get to the end?
I think that comes more before you book in your recording sessions. It’s at the end of the demo stages, because the long part of it is the writing process, obviously. When you start coming to the end of that and saying, okay, we’re ready to record, booking the studio for drums now. When it gets close to that, you start going, oh, should I tweak this, should I change that? But for the most part, we demoed this to death. The demos are not drastically different to the album. There’s a few things that we did spontaneously in the studio, but they’re mainly vocal things that we tried out. I don’t want to go around in circles with it, because I’ve done that before, and it drives you insane when you’re chasing your tail. You’re best just drawing a line in the sand, saying, this is the guitar sound I’m after, record it. This is the drum sound, this is exactly how we want it to be. That’s a problem with modern recording, I think.
It’s a nice problem to have, but it means you have endless possibilities, which is kind of not conducive to making songs better. You should concentrate on the song, and less about all the many variables that you can move.

Did COVID really get in the way or contribute to the long gap between albums?
Yeah, because we couldn’t tour. We were ready to release Obsidian, the previous album. It was due for release, and then lock downs happened, so it was released right at the start of the lock downs. Nuclear Blast said, you don’t have to release it, wait to see what happens. We just said, put it out, because people will be sat at home. They’ll want to read books, or want to play games, or want to listen to music. Why not one of our records be it? We put it out. We know a lot of bands that waited and waited and delayed and delayed. I don’t think there was a right way to do it, but I think it helped us in a way. I think people really focused on the album more than they would have done if they didn’t have that time in lock down. But it also meant we couldn’t tour it. So we had to wait for lock downs to lift before we could tour it, which delayed everything by two years, pretty much. So when we say five years between albums, two years of that is COVID. The rest is pretty much a normal album cycle.

Was there also a delay in songwriting?
About three years ago, I had five or six songs written, and I just wasn’t feeling it, and I scrapped everything. Took some time off, didn’t write again and then we did a re-recording of an older record, Icon, and it kick-started the inspiration and creative juices again. We started again last autumn, and it came thick and fast then, the inspiration. We got it done quite fast then, sometimes you just can’t rush it.

Would you ever revisit those scrapped songs?
I was pretty brutal. I deleted, pretty much everything because I went round and round in circles with it, and I just thought, I’m just not feeling it. Couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Just wasn’t exciting to me. So yeah, I just thought, stop, get out of here, don’t do it anymore because you’re just repeating yourself, and that’s one of those things, it happens from time to time, and you have to wait for inspiration to strike.

When approaching Ascension, was the direction clear in your mind?
It became more apparent when we’d done the Icon recording, because relearning those old songs from the ’92, ’93, ’94 era of the band makes you realise how your songwriting style and even your guitar playing style incrementally changes over the years. You end up with quite big difference after a long time and it really made us want to explore that way of writing and playing again. A lot of it’s down to the two guitars, I never play the same, pretty much, as the other guitar. It’s always doing melodies where the vocal ends, the harmony guitar starts, then the vocal comes back in. It ties it all together. So, there was that, and there was also this feel of we wanted to go back into the depths of what Paradise Lost is, even from the name of the band.

Where does it come from? The book? What’s the book about?
We went back into all that religious iconography and metaphor and imagery. The whole album became shaped around that then, and when we had the title Ascension, it really made the fact I was writing it in autumn and winter as well, it became a very autumn-winter type Christmas, almost type record to me. It sent us down a path. It gives a general idea where to head.

Lyrically, the album is brilliant. Did it take a long time to reach that depth, and how much did your own research inform the writing?
Well, the lyrics generally come about because I’ll give Nick, our vocalist, a piece of music. We’ll to and fro. He sings in three or four different vocal styles. He’ll give me back three or four different vocal styles. We’ll blend it a little bit, and then we’ll see what images this piece of music conjures up. For instance, even when I was young, listening to music, if someone said, “Oh, that’s really heavy,” I’d say, “No, it sounds like a storm coming in,” or something like that. I think of it in very visual or sensory terms. Music is very much escapism. When we hear this piece of music, it’s like, what does it conjure up? A good example of that is the first single, Sounds Like the Grave. The big bombastic brass in it sounds very military, sounds very warlike.

Nick made it about the rise and fall of empires. No specific war, just why people end up in wars, and come out of them, and how empires become huge and then dissipate. I think when you hear the song, it’s like, yeah, that’s what it says to me. The same is true of all the other songs, whatever the song is about, it’s because that’s what images it conjured up in our minds when we were listening to it. Like I say, it’s subjective. People might listen to it and think something totally different, but from our point of view, that’s generally how we get the little nugget in the head of what the song will be about lyrically.

How was the studio experience and seeing these songs come to life?
That’s always my favorite bit. I’ve always enjoyed the creative aspect more than the performing aspect, personally. I know the guys in the band are different. But me, I like hearing things come together, something that’s been in the back of your head come to fruition. Recording-wise, it was a little bit more spread out this time. We went to north Sweden, to an old Lutheran church that’s been converted to a studio, to record the drums. It had the most amazing live room, and that’s why we went there. So every reverb you hear on the drums on the record is just the room itself being pushed up in volume or pulled down in volume, depending on the song. It was the middle of winter, thick snow, like a picture-perfect scene. Most of the guitars, bass, female vocals, keyboards, acoustics, I did at my studio. A lot of stuff came from the demos as well. Some stuff was kept back, because sometimes you just can’t recreate the magic you have with the demo. People call it demo fever sometimes. Then we went back to Sweden to a different studio to do the vocals. So yeah, it was a little bit spread out, but I liked doing it that way. It gave you a few weeks in between each section to assess it, or take a break from listening to it, which is important, and go back to it with fresh ears. It was enjoyable. I like doing it that way. I think I’d try and do it that way in future, if there is a future.

Have you started playing these songs live yet, and how do they integrate with your older material?
No, we haven’t played any of it live yet, because we’ve been out pretty much solidly for the last four months. In fact, straight from mixing the album, we went straight to South America. Did a tour there, Mexico, North America, came back, supported King Diamond on tour and summer festivals. I had some time off before we began rehearsals for the first leg of the European tour.

The big question for Aussie fans. are there plans for an Australian tour next year?
It’s been talked about right now, as we speak. This autumn-winter, we’re doing the first leg of the European tour. End of January, we head to America again for a few shows. Then that’s straight into the second leg of the European tour. But after that, I think late spring, early summer, that’s when they’re looking at putting in Australia, Japan, something like that. Logistically, just to go to Australia is kind of financially undoable for a lot of people. You have to tie in things along the way. Hopefully something will come off around late spring, early summer.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Ascension is out now through Nuclear Blast. Buy/ Steam HERE…