Soul Killer by The Lucidia Project is my first experience with the band  and as entry level, getting in on the ground floor moments go, it’s a pretty damn good one.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going in. Normally, I’ll jump onto Bandcamp or Ampwall and check out a bands catalogue, but as this wasn’t an option – and I can’t use Spotify to stream albums due to my laptop having experienced death by not loading properly – I decided to go the YouTube route. The way I do this is I put the video on, stick my phone in my pocket, and let the track do what it does, and what Soul Killer and The Lucidia Project did was, quite honestly, blow me away.

It’s heavy, it’s metal, it classical, it’s grand in scale, it hits all the right notes musically for me, but the vocals, well they took my breath away.

Maybe it’s because I’m so used to hearing gutteral roars, high pitched screams, or the human voice being used as another instrument layered over whatever extreme metal is playing, that I had seemingly forgotten that sometimes people, y’know, actual use their vocal cords to sing. And what a set of vocal cords are on offer here.

They are sublimely eerie, beautifully melancholic, and have an otherwordly sorrow to them that seeps into your very bones. And when you place them over the top of a piece of music that is both powerful and fragile at the same time, The Lucidia Project deliver a track that will bury itself deep into your psyche and flat out refuse to leave.

As I said, I didn’t know what to expect going into Soul Killer, but having come out of the otherside I now do. The Lucidia Project delivers some of the most emotionally evocative metal around, that will stay with you long after the final notes have faded.