lukretion I follow female-fronted symphonic metal with both curiosity and wariness. My unease mostly comes from the fact that the genre’s strict stylistic parameters make it fairly difficult to innovate. As a result, for each album that catches my interest there are other ten that fall completely flat, all sounding similar to one another like faded copies of something written 20 years ago by Nightwish or Epica. Fortunately, Deep Sun’s third full-length Dreamland - Behind the Shades is THAT one "black swan" that I keep looking forward to each time I go through the list of new symphonic metal releases.

The Swiss band have been around for a while, now. Founded in 2005, it took them several years before they released their debut EP Flight of the Phoenix in 2013. Two full-length albums followed in 2016 and 2019 and Deep Sun gained more and more popularity especially in their home country. The band started pre-producing Dreamland in late 2020, so a lot of time and work went into it, and the results certainly show this. I was instantly struck by two things when I listened to this LP. First, the songs preserve a freshness and unpredictability that are hard to find in the symphonic metal genre. The band put a lot of thought in the songwriting, using bridges, instrumental detours, and occasionally even structures that avoid any repetition, to ensure that the listener can rarely tell where a song will go next. The arrangements are also very clever, especially Tom Hiebaum’s excellent classically-influenced orchestrations, which are well integrated with Stephan Riner’s guitar work, creating a complex yet highly accessible harmonic structure. This “progressive” take on the symphonic genre is absolutely refreshing and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting through the nearly 50 minutes of the album, as time literally flew by.

The second remarkable thing about this album is the quality of the melodies. They are incredibly catchy without being trite or predictable. There is a lot of variety too, as singer Debora Lavagnolo explores many different moods and styles, using both her natural voice and operatic singing and incorporating folk as well as classical music influences in the construction of her vocal lines. She is a real powerhouse, technically impeccable but not at all sterile in her delivery, as too many other singers in this genre. Listen, for instance, to her performance on “Killer in the Dream” and the heart-rending ballad “In Silence”, which show her incredible ability to adapt her voice to the mood of the song to convey emotions with her singing. If I were to draw a comparison, her performance on Dreamland reminded me of Sharon den Adel's on Within Temptation’s masterpiece Mother Earth. Come to think of it, there may be subtle similarities between that album and Dreamland, in terms of the intoxicating exhilaration they both transmit to the listener.

Deep Sun are a breath of fresh air in a genre that is way too often self-referential and stale. Granted, there is nothing ground-breaking on Dreamland either, as Deep Sun do stay within the stylistic parameters of the operatic metal genre, after all. But their ability to write so exquisitely arranged songs that remain unpredictable and fresh even after repeated listens is truly a plus as well as a rarity in the genre. While I will keep scouting the list of new releases to see if I can stumble upon another black swan, Dreamland is a serious candidate for the top position in my “symphonic metal album of the year” list.