The case against a ninth symphonic metal album makes itself. The form was settled before the century turned, the soprano, the choir, the string section and the double kick drum each have an assigned seat in it, and a band nine albums deep can do nothing but polish the machinery it inherited, turning the same handle for the same result. Eclipse is built as a reply to that case. It concedes most of it, and wins back the rest on workmanship.
The one member who has never left, the composer Marco Heubaum, built this record at his own Neverworld Studios and handed it to Napalm Records for release on 7 August 2026, eleven tracks in fifty seven minutes and thirty three seconds, sung by Ambre Vourvahis with Rob Klawonn on guitar and Dimitrios Gatsios on drums, the same line-up that made The Wonders Still Awaiting in 2023. Nobody new came through the door. Speaking to Chaoszine on 25 August 2026, Heubaum called Xandria "a playground for everything that we love to do in music" and denied any "one formula that we have to just repeat, on and on just to keep this going." The record agrees with him about half the time.
Hold it against an orrery, the brass clockwork of planets in which one turn of a crank sets every sphere moving on its own arm, along an orbit computed long before anyone touched the handle. "Syzygy", eighty three seconds long, turns the crank, and its title is the astronomer's word for three bodies drawn into a single line, the very event an orrery exists to perform on cue. Then "Eclipse" engages the gears, the album's best argument for the formula: a riff that saws straight through the gloss of the string section, a chorus placed exactly where the harmony wants its weight, and Vourvahis riding over all of it with room to spare.
The sun at the centre of the mechanism
The singer who fronted The Wonders Still Awaiting is the reason any of this turns. Vourvahis carries a full orchestra and a guitar wall at the same moment without thinning, with the reach for the top lines and the push for the heavy ones, and she never sounds like a soprano borrowed for the evening from another profession. She is the sun this orrery is built around, and every brass arm on the record is measured from her. Speaking to Femme Metal Webzine on 20 August 2026, she put the method in a single sentence: "We were more focused on serving the song." It shows. It also sets the ceiling.
"Colours" does the dirty work. Its riff is the second strong case for the guitars of Klawonn and Heubaum, harder and more modern in grain than the title track, and it tears the verse open so that the chorus has somewhere to land, which it does, and stays. "The Shannon's Home" goes the other way, toward the most open and immediate melody on the album, the one song here that a radio could play whole without apology, and the clean, hall-sized production suits it better than it suits anything heavier. That is not a complaint. It is a description of where this record is most at home.
"Wave of Tanis" is where the album divides a room. Hear it as a detour into eighties gloss that the running order did not need, or hear the restraint in it, the orchestra held back and the piano given space, as the one moment the mechanism idles on purpose. The second hearing is the right one, because an hour this full of arrangement needs one track that is allowed to breathe. Restraint is rare here.
An eclipse on schedule
What holds the score down is the sky itself. The orbits on this record were charted by other astronomers: the lineage runs straight back through Nightwish, with Epica and Delain turning on the neighbouring arms, and on any honest reading Eclipse models that sky with more precision than it adds to it. You watch the shadow approach three turns of the crank away, and when it falls, it falls exactly where the brass said it would, which is a fine thing to admire on a desk and a smaller thing to live with for an hour.
An eclipse in an orrery is never a surprise.
The words are the one place where Heubaum set out to break his own habit. He told Chaoszine on the same day that "in the past, people did not realise much when we were tackling political topics in the lyrics," and that this time "I probably have to be a bit more direct so people really notice." The lyrics are more direct: division and decline are named plainly. The music around them does not become any more direct in return, and a blunter sentence sung over the same gleaming machinery changes the text without changing the orbit.
"Lore" comes closest to breaking the mould. At eight minutes and thirty seven seconds it runs more than two and a half minutes past anything else in the running order, brings Storch's violin into the arrangement, and lets the arrangement unfold at a length the other ten songs never attempt, and it is the one place where the mechanism strains against its own housing and the planets seem, briefly, to move under their own weight. It could lose a minute. It should not lose more.
For anyone who wants the full symphonic apparatus built by people who know every screw in it, and sung by a voice at full stretch, Eclipse repays the hour. For anyone who wanted the case against a ninth album answered outright, it answers only in "Lore", and eight and a half minutes out of fifty seven are not enough to overturn it. Ignoring the record costs you a singer working at full strength and four songs worth keeping. Buying it costs you the hope that the sky above this music still holds a star nobody has already mapped.