PARADISE LOST Announces Release Date For Re-Recorded Version Of 'Icon' Album

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of their fourth album, "Icon", British gothic metal pioneers PARADISE LOST recently re-recorded the LP for a special new release. There will also be "an extra special vinyl" version of the album, both of which will be made available on December 1.

"Icon 30" track listing:

01. Embers Fire
02. Remembrance
03. Forging Sympathy
04. Joys Of The Emptiness
05. Dying Freedom
06. Widow
07. Colossal Rains
08. Weeping Words
09. Poison
10. True Belief
11. Shallow Seasons
12. Christendom
13. Deus Misereatur

The re-recorded version of "Widow", taken from "Icon 30", can be streamed below.

PARADISE LOST frontman Nick Holmes comments: "Thanks to everybody that has pre-ordered 'Icon 30' so far. We are now pleased to share with you this new version of 'Widow' from the album.

"Looking back 30 years ago we seemed to perpetually be making music videos around the time we originally recorded 'Icon', one of the most memorable was the 'Widow' video. As health and safety didn't seem to exist, and while it was definitely no fun for him, just watching Aaron [Aedy, guitar] hanging by his feet, suspended by rope whilst blasted with a high powered water canon was highly amusing at the time, and it's funnier to think the prospect of making such a video nowadays would more than likely result in at least one of us ending up in A&E ['Accident and Emergency' department, the U.K.'s equivalent of an American emergency room]."

"Icon 30" is a totally re-recorded version of "Icon", and PARADISE LOST once again worked with longtime collaborator and producer Jaime Gomez Arellano.

PARADISE LOST recorded the vocals and drums for "Icon 30" at Jaime's new studio Arda Recorders in Porto, Portugal. The rest of the album was completed at guitarist Greg Mackintosh's Black Planet Studios. "Icon 30" also features brand new artwork created by Scott Robinson and new liner notes from Kerrang!'s Nick Ruskell.

Holmes previously stated about PARADISE LOST's decision to re-record "Icon": "Our specific record deal around the time we signed for the 'Icon' album meant we would never actually own the rights to our music or artwork, so going forward, to reissue the album ourselves for the 30th anniversary, it was necessary to re-record and completely re-do the album cover. Re-recording 'Icon' has not only enabled us to release it as a series of collectors editions on vinyl, but it was also great to revisit some songs from a lifetime ago. Nothing can replace those original recordings or ever will, they are a nostalgic part of all our lives but it has been a lot of fun revisiting those early [Music For Nations] days once again, and I hope the end result displays that!"

"Icon" marked a departure from the death-doom sound of PARADISE LOST's early work and was the last album to feature Matthew Archer on drums.

In February 2018, "Icon" was inducted into the Decibel "Hall Of Fame", with the magazine naming it influential to the development of the gothic metal subgenre.

This past March, PARADISE LOST welcomed Guido Zima Montanarini as their official new drummer.

In September 2022, Finnish drummer Waltteri Väyrynen left PARADISE LOST to join OPETH. At the time, he issued a statement saying that his decision involved "absolutely no bad blood or drama whatsoever."

PARADISE LOST's latest album, "Obsidian", was released in May 2020 via Nuclear Blast.

PARADISE LOST will embark on the "Icon" 30th-anniversary tour of Europe in December.

Formed in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1988, PARADISE LOST were unlikely candidates for metal glory when they slithered from the shadows and infiltrated the U.K. underground. But not content with spawning an entire subgenre with early death/doom masterpiece "Gothic" nor with conquering the metal mainstream with the balls-out power of 1995's "Draconian Times", they have subsequently traversed multiple genre boundaries with skill and grace, evolving through the pitch-black alt-rock mastery of 1990s classics "One Second" and "Host" to the muscular but ornate grandeur of 2009's "Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us" and "Tragic Idol" (2012),with the nonchalant finesse of grand masters. The band's "The Plague Within" (2015) and "Medusa" (2017) albums saw a much-celebrated return to brutal, old-school thinking, via two crushing monoliths to slow-motion death and spiritual defeat.

Photo credit: Anne C. Swallow for Nuclear Blast Records