Paradise Lost: Nick Holmes on Ascension, Guido's Exit, and Finally Coming Back to Australia

There aren't many bands left who can claim to have invented something. Paradise Lost can. Formed in Halifax in 1988, a handful of teenagers working through doom-death's earliest, ugliest years stumbled onto a sound that didn't have a name yet — heaviness dragged through shadow and melody, grief turned into architecture. By 1991's Gothic, the name existed. Gothic metal wasn't a marketing term retrofitted onto them; it was coined because of them. Four years later, Draconian Times dragged that same sound into rooms it had no business being in, and the influence has never really stopped leaking outward — you can trace lines from Paradise Lost to Cradle of Filth, to HIM, to Gatecreeper, to Chelsea Wolfe, bands that never sound like each other but all owe something to the same source.

Thirty-five-plus years and over two million albums later, they're still doing it. Ascension, their seventeenth record, landed in September 2025 through Nuclear Blast — the longest gap between studio albums in the band's history, five years on from 2020's Obsidian. It's also the last record to feature drummer Guido Montanarini, who left the band in May 2025 partway through the album's life. None of that slowed the record down. If anything, Ascension hits harder and louder than anything they've put out in years — a band with nothing left to prove still finding new ways to sound urgent.

At the centre of all of it is Nick Holmes: founding vocalist, the only member of the band's original lineup to never miss an album, and one of the few singers in extreme music who can move between a guttural death growl and a genuinely melodic clean vocal without either one sounding like a compromise. Nearly forty years in, he's still writing lyrics that treat religion, death, and despair as things worth actually thinking about rather than aesthetic props — which is a big part of why this band has outlasted every trend that tried to swallow it.

And now, after nearly a decade away, Paradise Lost are finally coming back to Australia. The absence was long enough that an entire generation of local fans has never seen them play a note in the room with them. That gap is exactly where this conversation started.

Caught Nick on the phone ahead of the run, and the conversation moved through:

-The making of Ascension — what five years of distance and a file-trading writing process (rather than jamming in a room) did to the material, and whether time apart makes the band more brutal editors of their own work or just lets bad ideas linger longer.

-The album's title and its relationship to religion — Ascension leans hard into the idea of faith as a last-minute escape hatch from the fear of dying, and how much of that is genuine provocation versus something Nick actually sits with.

-Guido Montanarini's exit — recorded as his final album with the band, and whether that uncertainty shaped the record's unusually heavy, thunderous character.

-Sequencing a record for a playlist-first world — why Nick still thinks in A-side/B-side terms when almost nobody listens that way anymore.

-Carrying the weight of having named a genre — what it's like watching thirty-plus years of bands build entire identities out of a sound Paradise Lost stumbled into as teenagers.

-The Icon 30 nostalgia cycle — how playing thirty-year-old material alongside writing new material does or doesn't bleed into each other.

-The ten-year gap from Australia — the unglamorous logistics of why a band this established can still fall off the map for a continent, for a decade.

-Building a setlist from a 17-album catalogue — how you represent doom-death origins, the Draconian Times commercial peak, and the electronic detour years without the set feeling like five different bands playing one show.

-Whether there's anything left that could still surprise him — closing the loop on nearly forty years of a band that, by his own account, always knows when something sounds like them.

Awesome chat from an excellent legend:

https://youtu.be/pnOV2DLH14Y