Amorphis – Borderland
Release Date: 26th September 2025
Label: Reigning Phoenix Music
Order/Stream
Genre: Melodic Death Metal, Progressive Metal.
FFO: Octoploid, Barren Earth, Orphaned Land, Katatonia, Kalevala, Opeth, Borknagar, Sentenced, Karelia, In Vain.
Review By: Malte Brigge
Amorphis’s first six albums trace one of the most metamorphic sonic divergences of almost any band I can think of. Each album draws influence from the preceding while anticipating the direction of the next, until 1992’s debut The Karelian Isthmus and 2003’s Far from the Sun sound like completely different bands. The eight albums since have pretty much painted from the same palette while continually, sometimes playfully, exploring ways to keep their prog-curious, folk-dabbling, MENA-nodding melodic death metal sounding fresh. Number fifteen isn’t usually where most bands discover something new, but Amorphis isn’t most bands. Is their curiosity on Borderland the captivating or killing kind?
As far back as “Magic and Mayhem” from 1994’s iconic Tales from the Thousand Lakes, Amorphis have dabbled in the danceability of death metal, but on Borderland they make it the main story. Songs like Dancing Shadow (working title: “Disco Tiger”), The Strange and especially Light and Shadow push jangling guitars and keyboards forward, are catchy as fuck and sound like mirror ball light bouncing off death metal dancefloors. If Amorphis was subtly poppy before, more nagging than overt in their catchiness, it is now the name of the game, not an accidental by-product. And it works: I have not wanted to stop listening to Borderland since receiving it, and each listen is more gratifying than the last.
Opener The Circle is a soft landing, the early notes a bit reminiscent of Skyforger’s “Sky is Mine” but with rounder edges and waaaay more delay, blowing up that trademark Amorphis sound with enough pop-melodic groove and singalong chorus to revive 1980s MTV. The death growls introduced in the back half prepare you for Bones, my favorite of this batch and maybe their most bruising song since The Beginning of Times. It would not be out of place on Elegy or Under the Red Cloud with the sitar writhing on top of those thick guitars. It’s Borderland’s heaviest and, to my brain, catchiest: “From darkness they arrived / Lucid and mercurial / The creeping figures in the fog” bounces around my head no matter what else I’m doing or listening to, and I’m okay with that. The album flows smoothly through melodic catchiness and richly atmospheric songs that draw from diverse sources of inspiration. The EDM-lite movements on Light and Shadow are followed, as if naturally, by a dark synthwave stream in The Lantern (Vangelis is cited as an inspiration in the promo sheet). Another top-50 contender, it features a keyboard solo that could have been an out-take from Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”. It’s all wrapped in that warm Amorphis blanket of sound you could just roll around in. Layers of primary and secondary instruments—every instrument at all times is crystal clear in Jacob Hansen’s massive production—give Borderland cinematic scope and details that keep your ears alert and reward repeat listens.
Whereas the last twenty years of Amorphis have produced albums earthy in tone and weighty in meaning, Borderland seeks the skies and traverses nebulous dreamscapes but skirts the psychedelia of their early 2000s experiments. The keyboards and guitars twist and twine with each other, spiralling off into effect-laden solos or syncing up with Olli-Pekka Laine’s reliable, rolling bass to lather enough atmosphere to terraform a mid-sized planet. Fog to Fog moves from flying on Falcore to wandering the Swamps of Sadness and back, while Tempest, almost a ballad, gathers the crew around to listen to a tale of woe as we go spelljamming. The album closes with the beautiful, descending Despair, which has Borderland’s most unique and plaintive melody, recalling the odd twists Pasi Koskinen memorably invoked during the band’s paisley days. Tomi Juotsen’s growls are dark and deep, like a face beneath the surface of the waters of a marsh, while his evocative cleans make you want to look back one last time at what you left behind. It feels like we’re setting off on a voyage as equally exciting as trepidatious.
Borderland is pretty damned good with some great moments, and Amorphis continue to be excellent songwriters. While I don’t love the disco-adjacent fluorescence dancing around the album, I appreciate its distinctiveness and struggle to find anything really to criticize. After all, if I were to dance, I’d want the music to sound like this. There’s no bloat across its fifty minutes, the writing is interesting, the sheen production doesn’t undermine the liveliness of the playing. What makes AmorphisAmorphis is their ability to incorporate disparate styles and elements without sacrificing their central identity. Borderland may not reach the levels of perfection they’ve achieved in the past, but it’s different enough to keep us wondering what more Amorphis can do and good enough to keep us wanting to find out.
(4 / 5)
