Paradise Lost - Lost Paradise

Paradise Lost's 1990 debut, Lost Paradise, is described as a raw, bleak, and influential early death/doom metal album, notable for its subterranean atmosphere and Nick Holmes' impressive teenage vocals. While considered a landmark for slowing death metal and foreshadowing the band's future gothic direction, it's often seen as a relatively unsophisticated "product of a band finding its way". Reviews highlight the album's strong atmosphere and its foundational role in the death/doom subgenre, even if the songwriting is considered less refined than their later, more melodic releases.  

The punishingly bleak death metal on Paradise Lost’s 1990 debut Lost Paradise makes it the odd-one-out in a discography more renowned for gothic melody. But the five teenagers had only been together about a year before being faced with the challenge of recording their first record and, despite not having found their voice yet, they make a pretty decent fist of it. A lack of songcraft means it all kind of mushes together but they already have their doleful mix of riff and lead guitar down, there’s the occasional decent hook (“where is your God now?”), and the whole thing has a entrancingly subterranean atmosphere. And Lost Paradise has proven pretty influential in its own right as one of the earliest albums to slow death metal down to a miserable crawl. The Yorkshiremen would do much better with subsequent releases but fans of meat and potatoes death/doom could do a lot worse than check this out.

Ripped to MP3

1. Intro

2. Deepky Inner Sense

3. Paradise Lost

4. Our Saviour

5. Rotting Misery

6. Frozen Illusion

7. Breeding Fear

8. Lost Paradise

9. Internal Torment II