Host are a new band featuring Nick Holmes on vocals and Greg Mackintosh on guitar, both of Paradise Lost fame. Folks are already stoked on this new endeavor, and they’ve been signed to Nuclear Blast Records.
In addition to the signing, they will be dropping their debut album, IX, on February 24 of next year. To get a taste of what this will entail, they released a video for the track “Tomorrow’s Sky,” directed by Ash Pears of AshTV. It’s a little poppy and a lot heavy, so those who dig a little melody and mainstream sensibility tempered with enough hard edge to keep it in the metal camp should enjoy this one.
Check out the video here:
About the new project, Greg Mackintosh says:
“Host is something that I had in mind for a few years but never had the time to do it justice until now. It’s taking the concept of what we attempted to do on the Paradise Lost album Host but approaching it in a modern context. It’s part ’80s goth, part electro , part rock, but none of them specifically. The emphasis is on hooks and atmosphere. It’s quite a challenge to make miserable music catchy, and hopefully we’ve achieved that to some degree.
“We always stood by ‘Host’ as an album,” he adds. “This project is not totally connected to that album, but some of the ideas are extrapolated. We’re taking the basic premise and trying it out now. And, really, it was something fun and interesting for us to do. We’ve been doing Paradise Lost for a long time and got an itch to try something different from where PL is now. I could take PL down this route again. Who knows? It may happen if we live long enough, but I thought, ‘Why not now?’ I had the time to do it.”
In the press release about the drop, Holmes and Mackintosh detail how they are inspired by the West Yorkshire goth music scene in the late ’80s. They were mostly into metal, but also checked out new wave and goth shows at the time, an influence that is evident in their music. The melodies and rhythms spoke to them, and they decided to channel more of that with this new project.
Host is:
Nick Holmes – Vocals
Greg Mackintosh – Guitars, Synths & Programming