Gorod have very unsubtly reinvented themselves for The Ember Gone. Was it a good idea? Probably the wrong question to ask.
Release date: August 28, 2026 | Base Productions | Facebook | Instagram | Stream/Purchase
Upon hearing the first single for The Ember Gone, I was preparing to get a big ‘MISSING’ ad on every milk carton I could (hardly anyone’s gonna get that reference). Gorod‘s intense, angular technical death metal fare was totally missing the ‘technical death’ aspect, replaced now with a more straightforward progressive slant. Where did it go? Should we care? Is the remaining stuff still good? A band changing things up to this degree is absolutely worth discussion, but you have to do it in a reasonable way. Some of you motherfuckers can’t do that, everything is either dogshit horrible or a deified paragon of greatness where no critique is possible, and while I don’t think the way I do things is perfect or even right, we’re certainly going to try to achieve that here with this review.
The first thing worth tackling in hopes of not burying any lede is, yeah, The Ember Gone is pretty good! My relationship with straight-up prog metal is tenuous these days so trusting in a band who I really enjoy like Gorod made me not only comfortable to see how they pull it off, but bask in what it had to offer and think back to my big-time prog rock and metal phase where I absolutely relished in stuff like this and adjacent. It was more about mood than technicality to me – emotion has always hit hardest and that’s never really changed, so it’s to Gorod‘s benefit that they really layer that on with The Ember Gone.
The whole album just feels somber. I think of the lengthy opening of “Forgiveness”. Even when it turns into a prog wonderland before the three-minute mark, its thematic playing with the myth of Prometheus for the lyrical weight presses on your chest. I love how the song seems to interrogate our misuse of fire and knowledge, the most extreme cases of which have been damaging our world for decades and will until nothing ever grows again with the only thing left to do is to come together finally when it’s too late. The cleanly sung segments are striking as well.
“Regret” is along the same vein, but it’s also one of the most technical songs on The Ember Gone. It actually sounds a bit like an earlier Mastodon song with the vocal melodies and busier guitars in the intro, but the bulk of the track is spent building tension with eclectic, technical sections which are then cooled off with progressive interludes so as not to blow the whole place up. This dynamic has really upped Gorod‘s ability to not just play with expectations, I think that much was apparent from the start, but to also allow wiggle room for different flavors of density and heaviness to be called upon when needed, and collapse it all into a shining star that the whole album is represented by.
Honestly, and this is the lede I did bury a bit, this is all somewhat a stylistic callback to Gorod‘s Transcendence EP/long single from 2011, a project I hadn’t heard until I looked deeper into their history. It’s really good! Coming onto the Gorod train when they released Aethra in 2018 and only moving forward with them, well, perhaps you can see why The Ember Gone was so surprising. It is, but contextually it makes good on the band’s ability and apparent wont to never stagnate for too long. They’ve been so good at weaving hard-bodied, sundering, apocalyptic metal, but when the themes start to get a bit more serious like with this album, scaling back (but not watering down!) only offers more clarity and opportunity to ponder, to get lost in the emotionality of it all. Gorod sing and scream of our world gone to hell and it might be too late to do anything about it. This is their effective eulogy, made more effective by their approach.
The best thing The Ember Gone did was to not overindulge. This LP is on the higher end of runtime for the typical Gorod album, but doesn’t feel it. They went progressive without drowning us in a deluge to bring the point past home like ‘hey guys, we’re doing something new and different now!‘ Really, at the end of it all, Gorod went about altering their formula in about the best way you could. The soul of their writing and performing is still there, the adventurousness is firmly intact with tracks like “Crimson”, and it manages to hit like a Gorod album should: chaotic and with feeling. Keep an open mind and you’ll like it too. If the track “Ember” doesn’t make you feel something, re-evaluate.
Band photo by Leonor Anankei
