The Silver move ever closer to becoming a vaunted monolith in modern metal by making good on all the promise their debut album showed, and then some.
Release date: March 20, 2026 | Gilead Media | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
It certainly wasn’t enough for The Silver to drop a wonderful debut album in 2021 by the name of Ward of Roses. It was something not immediately attainable for me, but the all-star contemporary metal roster with members of death metal GOATs Horrendous, doomsters Crypt Sermon, and ripping black metal sorcerers Daeva made me commit and give it the time it ultimately deserved because I ultimately cracked the code of their nebulous metal. It’s an oily mixture of black, death, and progressive metal, but a beautiful one.
This year sees the supergroup come forth with an extra member (another bud from Horrendous), a new awesomely mirrored logo, and their sophomore album called Looking Glass Hymnal Blue. If I told you that this outdoes everything achieved on Ward of Roses, would you believe me? Where that debut album was a remarkably confident distillation of years of talent and hard work manifested into something truly new and fun, toying with notions of dark Romantic (in the classical artistic sense, hence the capital R) sensibilities flanked by suffering, yearning, and more, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue doubles down on it in addition to increased musicianship and lovely writing that betrays most genre conventions we stubbornly hold onto.
Every song just feels so lovingly crafted as if chiseled from marble and draped in a black veil to mourn, or painted with a well-worn palette by wrinkled, learned hands at the twilight of a life. You hear flecks of death metal, but nothing overt. I think the most density on this album is awarded to black metal with occasional flogs of blast beats and sundering tremolo riffing. It all has a weight to it too, goes without saying instrumentally, but emotionally as well and that’s where the crux of the album lies. It’s gloomy, right down to the cover art which is a cyanotype, adorned with several shades of blue showing a sort of duality that’s present in the music itself: life, or fighting for it; and death, or succumbing to it.
“Two Candles” was the lead single and it’s exemplary of what the album entails without giving everything away. Leading with your longest track is always bold and it pays off here, showing how The Silver aren’t multifaceted for the sake of it, jumbling up their approach to melodic metal to appease a checklist, but to show the multitudes that are within the members of the band. Eruptive instrumentation gives way to soaring melody and dramatics so naturally that it’s bound to make a few bands jealous. Better get back in the booth, everyone else. The song also has some of my favorite lyrics, ‘Sometimes desire is worth the strain/And sometimes the fire can burn in the rain/And sometimes the tears can’t wash away the pain‘, delivered so passionately in the middle of a big clean vocal stretch. It just feels so good to hear against the melodies and it’s followed by one of the best solos I’ve heard this year so far.
The atmosphere is informed tonally with the instrumentation and clean vocals mostly, not so much open soundscapes and ambience although there is a bit of that here too. There’s synths on here so of course there’s some good atmo. There’s just this sweeping presence of the music that doesn’t leave much to question except maybe the overall plot of the album which I’m not convinced is a traditionally-threaded concept, but still vignettes of morose and complex emotions all the same. Fire and candles are a recurring lyrical reference, not to mention the implied darkness they can be found in and a general sense of cryptic existentialism as several different demons (some real in the album’s world, some seemingly metaphorical) are battled.
As with Ward of Roses, I guess this may not be an album that immediately hits you. It takes time, took me about three or so loops to really bask in its wondrous textures and downtrodden mood. It’s not betrayed by the energetic guitars because they too are tuned in such a manner that they contribute to and complement the mood. The drums as explosive as they are still don’t blow away the meaning of the music, but allow you to latch onto the rhythm and follow each track to its end. It’s such a keenly constructed beast of an album that I don’t feel right giving much else away. You just have to respect the music, sit down with it, and let it wash over you. I promise it’s worth it.
At certain points, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue reverberates with the DNA of some of my other favorite bands out there, and yet in totality this could be nothing but an album by The Silver. Two albums in and they’ve already proven to be one of the most enigmatic acts out there without getting too obscure or prohibitively dense. The attitude is immaculate, the musicianship is first-class, and it comes with high recommendation from me. It’s apparent that this band is capable of some truly stunning work and this is only the latest example. Don’t expect them to rest on their laurels either – we await whatever the future holds for this band.
