From the darkest corners of the North, Paara return to the surface with their third album, Laulut tulen ja jään, slated for release on 30 October via Dusktone. The band have now unleashed the album's first video single, "Pohjolan".

For more than a decade, Paara have cultivated a vision of Finnish black metal deeply rooted in the landscape that surrounds them. Their music evokes bleak winds sweeping across the fells, thousands of lakes and endless forests, drawing on the darkness of the old world while allowing moments of unexpected beauty to emerge.

Formed around fifteen years ago, Paara have developed into an entity that thrives on contradiction: brutal yet beautiful, harsh yet strangely comforting, black as the northern night yet capable of revealing flashes of warmth beneath its frozen surface. Their modern manifestations began with Yön olevainen puoli (2015) and Riitti (2018), establishing a distinctive approach to atmospheric black metal that balances aggression with melody and a strong sense of place.

After seemingly disappearing from view around 2019, Paara were never truly gone. The entity had retreated into the wilderness, gathering strength and tracing the roots of its inspiration through the darkest reaches of Northern nature and the distant past. Now, in 2026, it emerges once again with Laulut tulen ja jään — its most expansive and dynamic manifestation yet.

The album moves constantly between razor‑sharp black‑metal assaults and more majestic passages, with clean vocals and choral arrangements amplifying the grandeur of its most imposing moments. Yet Paara refuse to settle into predictability: their compositions are full of structural turns and unexpected developments, allowing delicate atmospheric passages to surface between harsher sections.

Guitars play a particularly important role, with acoustic passages adding an unexpected fragility and creating moments of stillness within the album's turbulent landscape. These quieter sections never feel ornamental; they become integral to the compositions, opening new perspectives before the music inevitably plunges back into darkness.

The songs on Laulut tulen ja jään are sharply defined and deliberately varied. Some unfold across more than ten minutes, patiently developing their ideas, while shorter pieces take a more concentrated approach, extracting impact from carefully shaped moods and textures. Despite the breadth of ideas, the album remains remarkably fluid, each composition finding its own path without disrupting the overall flow.

Rich in detail but never cumbersome, Laulut tulen ja jään finds Paara at their most expressive. Riffs, choirs, clean voices, acoustic guitars and atmospheric passages become facets of the same northern vision, forming an album that is both savage and majestic, intimate and imposing.

The old entity has returned. The darkness of the North has found another voice. Link