Hanging Garden’s ninth album.
Hailing from Finland, the band—comprising Mikko Kolari (guitar), Jussi Hämäläinen (guitar/vocals), Nino Hynninen (keyboards), Toni Hatakka (vocals), Jussi Kirves (bass, Inland), Antti Ruokola (drums), Riikka Hatakka (vocals), and Kimmo Tukiainen (guitar), still signed to Agonia Records, released Isle Of Bliss in 2026.
The album kicks off with a rather heavy tone on To Outlive the Nine Ravens, a track that doesn’t take long to explode and reveal its virulent Black Metal roots, blended with enchanting Melodic Doom/Death and soothing backing vocals. Between powerful screams and whispers, the rhythm section captivates us, pauses, and gently ignites once more, sometimes blending multiple elements to fuel the duality and anchor the track in its melancholy before handing the baton to Eternal Trees of Turquoise, which develops a more ethereal touch in its harmonics. The contrast is also very pronounced on this track, which shifts from heavy, intense moments to an intoxicating lightness that the musicians cultivate before letting the title track, Isle of Bliss, take over to unleash sounds that are more piercing, yet also colder. The two voices dance together, naturally responding to one another and gently leading us to To the Gates of Hel, where they repeat the same pattern between waves of heavy, aggressive distortion dominated by screams, before returning to a sense of vulnerability in the finale. We move on to The Death Upon Our Shoulders, a fairly short and dissonant track that creates a suffocating atmosphere before unfolding a calm mid-tempo passage—one that could explode at any moment and won’t hesitate to do so, barely returning to its gentlest tones before letting The Blights Nine hypnotize us in turn. The riffs naturally ignite, retaining that haunting, piercing quality that gives rise to some sumptuous trios between the two vocalists and the lead guitar, as in the finale that leads into the visceral and tortured Arise, Black Sun, which begins with a heart-wrenching scream and lets us navigate its saturation. The choruses are incredibly violent when the track is screamed, but the tranquility of the other parts also draws our attention; however, the track remains fairly short and fades out to make way for Her Waning Light, where we feel a certain sense of oppression. Black Metal roots take center stage once again, with piercing elements counterbalanced by clean vocals, while Beneath the Fallen Sky immediately immerses us in its soothing tranquility, relying almost more on this calm than on moments of pure violence, preferring to sprinkle it sparingly here and there to punctuate its progression toward the silence that closes the album.
Hanging Garden offers us with Isle Of Bliss another moment of calm, gentleness, and slowness, but also a few darker, more visceral traces. If, in the universe, everything is a matter of duality, the band knows exactly how to bring it to life.
90/100