Gothic Rock Reviews
Despite having devoted much of my musical love to hard rock and heavy metal since my early teenage years, the eerie clean guitars, darkly romantic atmosphere and often deep vocals of gothic rock greatly appeal to me. Several gothic rock releases are reviewed on this site, especially since the genre seems to have been going through a bit of a revival in recent years. You can find all of the Album of the Week reviews about gothic rock releases right here. Minor overlaps with my gothic metal reviews inevitably exist.
While I didn’t write a lot of gothic rock reviews in the first few years of Kevy Metal, when I didn’t properly tag my reviews yet, they may exist. Therefore, if you are looking for something specific, using the search bar at the bottom of the page to search by artist or release title is recommended.
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Album of the Week 18-2025: Deathless Legacy – Damnatio Aeterna
Honesty forces me to say that I didn’t quite know what to expect from Deathless Legacy’s sixth album ‘Damnatio Aeterna’. 2022’s ‘Mater Larvarum’ didn’t quite resonate with me as well as their other releases, but it is possible that its larger emphasis on vaguely Powerwolfy pop metal than usual was…
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Best of 2024: The Albums
In all honesty, I was not prepared for 2024 to be a year with such a great number of amazing new releases. In a way, it was great timing professionalizing the website halfway through a year with this release schedule, though it would be a blatant lie to chalk that…
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Album of the Week 40-2024: Cemetery Skyline – Nordic Gothic
With their debut album ‘Nordic Gothic’, Cemetery Skyline has proven that they understand the first rule of starting a new band while the bands the members are known for are still active: make it sound different. The members of Cemetery Skyline are all primarily known for their work in extreme…
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Album of the Week 15-2024: Dool – The Shape of Fluidity
On the surface, Dool seems to operate in similar territory as most of the dark rock bands that have been popping up slowly but steadily in recent years. Not unlike the gothic rock acts that inspired those bands, however, most of them manage to release one captivating album, after which…
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Album of the Week 14-2022: Héroes Del Silencio – Senderos De Traición
Zaragoza-based Héroes Del Silencio is one of Spain’s most famous rock bands and according to multiple band members, their sophomore album ‘Senderos De Traición’ is the only album on which everything came out exactly as they had wanted. With a producer in tow who wanted the band to sound like…
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Album of the Week 13-2022: D’Erlanger – Lazzaro
On the surface, D’Erlanger is a fairly typical early visual kei band. The goth-inspired presentation, the gratuitous and frequently incorrect use of the French language and the overtly, sometimes laughably sexual lyrics point in that direction. However, apart from their earliest days as a speed metal band, D’Erlanger always leaned…
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Album of the Week 04-2022: The Cure – Pornography
‘Pornography’ is my favorite album The Cure ever made by a considerable margin. It is considered the final part of their gloomy, downbeat trilogy, after which the band moved into a notably more upbeat, poppy direction. But where its predecessors ‘Seventeen Seconds’ and ‘Faith’ lacked a certain degree of urgency,…
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Album of the Week 20-2020: Triptykon with the Metropole Orkest – Requiem
No announcements, hardly any crowd noise, two thirds of the material never played before or since… Even live albums aren’t done in a conventional way by Triptykon. Of course, a conventional live album was never the set-up of ‘Requiem’. It combines the first and third acts of a requiem released…
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Album of the Week 15-2020: Dool – Summerland
Three years ago, debut album ‘Here Now, There Then’ by the Rotterdam-based band Dool took me completely by surprise. While it’s not uncommon for dark rock bands to nail the atmosphere associated with the scene, Dool actually has the songwriting chops and the exquisitely arranged guitar tapestries to completely ditch…
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