Hailing from the darkest depths of Finland, death doom metallers Swallow The Sun have returned after their triple release of 2015 to bring us a fourteen minute epic entitled ‘Lumina Aurea’.

Composed in the dark light of grief, ‘Lumina Aurea’ is desperate, beautiful and heart breaking. Heavy with the weight of emotion, both ‘Lumina Aurea’ and the upcoming 2019 release entitled ‘When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light’, was composed by lead songwriter Juha Raivio as an attempt to come to terms with the death of his long-term partner Aleah Stanbridge, who tragically lost her life to cancer in 2016. Fuelled by this loss ‘Lumina Aurea’ doesn’t sound like what you might expect from the band. Moving away from their recognisable death/doom styling, this song can only be described as the embodiment of darkness and misery.

Featuring Gregorian chants, haunting orchestral passages and spoken work treatises that sit atop emotional and searing growls, ‘Lumina Aurea’ has a lot for the listener to unpack and digest. Commenting on the song, Raivio offered the following. ‘Every word and note I wrote, I wrote for Aleah … about my own battle since she passed. The album title, When A Shadow Is Forced into the Light, comes from Aleah’s own words, ‘When a shadow is forced into the light.’ That was exactly what I needed to do. To push myself out from the shadows.’ Continuing, ‘Lumina Aurea’ is a song I would never want to write in my life,’ Raivio says. ‘It is an open, bleeding black wound from the last two and half years of my life. But I had to write it out. I could not back down from it.’

Additionally, to accompany the release of ‘Lumina Aurea’, Swallow the sun have also directed an evocative visualisation that features beautiful landscapes from around northern Finland. Seemingly centered around a mysterious figure draped from head to toe in thick black, the film is not direct with the meaning that it is attempting to convey. Instead, the audience is invited to apply their imagination and draw their own conclusions the pain and grief that flows from the piece.

What do you think it means?