Every gothic doom record has to answer the same question, and it is a harder one than it looks: whether the atmosphere is carrying the songs or standing in for them, whether the grey front the music rolls in off the water drowns every harbour light along the coast or keeps a lamp of its own burning somewhere inside it. Obscured Horizons is The Eternal answering that question. It is half an answer.
Released on 18 September 2026 through Reigning Phoenix Music, the eighth full-length album by the four-piece that keeps two members in Australia and two in Finland arrives twenty-two years after The Sombre Light of Isolation, two years after Skinwalker and eight months after the Celestial EP, which grew out of the same writing sessions, and it is the record its singer calls the most collaborative the band has made. That last fact is the whole bet.
The keeper of this light for most of those twenty-two years has been Mark Kelson, singer, guitarist and until now the principal writer, and on this record he shares the lamp room with Richie Poate on guitar, Niclas Etelävuori, formerly of Amorphis, on bass, and Jan Rechberger, the drummer Amorphis still employs, behind the kit. The line-up has not moved in roughly six years. Kelson set out the change himself.
This is the band's most collaborative album in our history, the current line-up of myself (Mark Kelson), Richie Poate, Niclas Etelävuori and Jan Rechberger have been solid for around six years now, and we all contribute to the song writing.Mark Kelson, Out Of The Blue Magazine, 18 August 2026
Picture the band as a lighthouse standing inside its own sea fog. The fog is the style, the slow and leaden weight of gothic doom that this band has been manufacturing for two decades and has no intention of surrendering; the lamp is Kelson's voice, controlled, warm and expressive, the one element of the record that never once gutters; and the beam is the guitar work of Kelson and Poate, heavy melodic lead lines with an edge borrowed from melodic death metal, swinging round the tower and cleaving the fog bank wherever it lands. When the beam falls on a song, the song is there, sharp and whole. When it swings away, the grey closes over it again.
Where the beam falls
"Lament for the Hollow" opens the door and does it properly, setting out every virtue the band owns in the first room: the voice at the centre, the guitars heavy and melodic at once, the bass and drums laying down a floor that the rest of the album will stand on. Then "Existing to Expire" throws the switch. The fastest and most aggressive song on the record, it is the one place where the rhythm section stops holding the ground and starts breaking it, Rechberger's kit hammering the mid-tempo floor into splinters beneath a riff that runs where everything around it walks, and it is the most direct reply the album makes to that opening question. Nothing here is atmosphere standing in for a song. It sounds like a band with four writers in it.
The title track is the other place the light holds steady, and the best song on the album: the widest of the nine, a piece that opens outward rather than pressing forward, the lamp at full strength and the beam thrown further than anywhere else on the record. "Liminality", the longest song here and the title the album was first meant to carry, takes its time the way a coastline comes out of fog, first a shadow, then a shape, then a cliff face with every seam visible on it. It asks for patience.
"I've Seen the Dream" is the album's most arguable song, and it divides a room cleanly. Hear it as the moment the air goes out of the middle of the record, or hear it as the most melodic writing on it, the guitars at their most songful and the voice right beside them. The second hearing is the right one. The trouble is not the song. The trouble is what stands around it.
When the beam falls on a song, the song is there. When it swings away, the fog takes it back.
The fog in the middle
The fault is the one the style invites, and it sits in the middle third of the album. Too much of the record moves at the same slow-to-middling pace, and across that stretch the songs lose their edges and bleed into one another, the fog bank rolling back over the tower until the beam is still turning somewhere inside it and nobody out on the water can see it at all. "Colours Fade" is the weakest song here, the point where the grey lies thickest and the beam seems least sure where to fall. "Harmony Breaks" is the exception inside that grey stretch, the one track that shakes the album out of its stillness for a few minutes before the weather settles again.
That stillness can be heard two ways: as the band's signature, a glacial composure held on purpose, or as a record that simply loses its momentum. On an album whose whole case rests on four writers opening the band up, it is the second. Four people at the table should have produced more contrast than this, not the same grey in four hands. It is not a collapse. It is a sag.
What the record gets right, it gets very right. Kelson's voice is the finest instrument the band has, controlled and warm across all nine songs, the lamp that holds when everything else dims; the rhythm section, built from two players who share the pedigree of one of the great melodic metal institutions of the north, is powerful and exact where it could easily have been merely serviceable; and the guitars carry melody and weight together without trading one for the other. "Awaken" closes the album on its most generous chorus, the lamp turned full towards the shore one last time, and it is a fitting way home.
Obscured Horizons refines what Skinwalker started rather than climbing past it, and that is both its merit and its limit. It is for the listener who keeps a place for gothic doom that sings rather than roars, who will take four songs of real light and forgive a middle spent in cloud. That listener should not pass it by: the title track and "Existing to Expire" carry the whole case for this line-up on their own. Everyone else can wait for the record on which the four writers clear the fog for good, because this one only proves that they can.