The Best New Metal Band
Horizon Ignited, a truly amazing Melodic-Death Metal Band
Spotify has a wonderful feature on their platform called “Discover Weekly”. It’s a playlist that’s updated every week and it gives new songs to you based on your listening habits. Now, I did not find this band on that playlist but! I wanted to ramble a little bit about a good way to find new music, as I feel finding new music is an important way to keep growing one’s musical taste.
Now that I got that out of my brain’s way, let’s discuss what I intended to from the beginning, Horizon Ignited. If you’re reading this, first off, thanks, but secondly you in all likelihood have no idea what I’m talking about so here’s a little crash-course. Horizon Ignited is a Finnsh Melodic Death Metal band that released their debut album in 2019 and their follow-up album in July 2022. Now before I continue, if you do not like very heavy vocals you probably won’t like a lot of their music. HOWEVER, there are a few gems that are purely clean vocals.
Horizon Ignited is a Melodic Death Metal band in every sense of the phrase. They’re a band (check), they’re metal (check), they have superb death metal vocals and guitars (check), and they have beautiful melodic guitars throughout along with some powerful melodic choruses (check). Normally, death metal bores me, that is not to say death metal is a boring genre RELAX, it just does not speak to me the way most metal does. I’m speaking broadly here, as there are some death metal songs that I enjoy, but you get what I mean. If you like death metal, you do you, we don’t have any problems I’m just giving a disclaimer. That being said, Horizon ignited’s ability to blend very heavy vocals and hard hitting riffs with beautiful melodic riffs and soaring vocals makes for an amazing product that even entertains non-liking death metal people like me.
In general, the instrumentation is phenomenal. I’m not gonna be that guy who pretends he knows what the bassist is doing on every song, I have no clue. I’m sure a more trained ear can hear it better than I can so I won’t speak er- write about that but I’m sure Jukka Haarala is doing great! The guitars from Johannes Mäkinen and Vili Vottonen are truly something special, with my favorite riff off their first album on the song “Plague of Dreams” and a second favorite on “Leviathan”. The drums from Jiri Vanhatalo are also great throughout. I’m not a drum expert (to be honest I’m not an anything expert) but I didn’t notice anything overly flashy from the drums but I was always happy with how the drums and guitars worked in unison,
I’ve started a whole new paragraph just to highlight Okko Solanterä vocals. Now is it fair that I’m paying the most attention to the vocals when everyone is working their asses of making an album, probably not, but he’s the frontman so I don’t know what to tell you. Okko’s range is really what amazes me the most about him. His ability to get down-and-dirty with some gnarly death metal vocals on songs like “End of the Line” and the aforementioned “Plague of Dreams”, contrasted with his ability to fly in the sky with vocals on songs like “Home” and “Aching Wings” is truly remarkable. The amazing thing is that when I was trying to select songs as examples my brain was overwhelmed because he can display the contrast within single songs such as in “Under the Bloodmoon” and “Toward the Dying Lands” and it’s amazing.
I heard their debut album back in 2019 and I fell in love with it. I have no memory of how they came on my radar but I’m so happy they did. I’ve listened to their first album “After the Storm” more times than I can count and their sophmore album “Toward the Dying Lands” is a wonderful follow up. I implore you, if you enjoy metal music, give this band a chance. It amazes me that these guys only have 50,000 monthly listeners on Spotify considering how truly amazing they are.
Check them out: