Do I have friends who like Lord Dying? My friend Jacob Koskimaki has tried to get me into them for a while, and what I heard before just didn’t capture my interest. Their most recent album Mysterium Tremendum has been a different experience for me so maybe I need to give their back catalog another chance. Even their logo on this concept album is all weird and tech looking, so maybe they are taking the band in a new direction. Whatever, I like it better. There’s a good bit of clean singing and vocal harmonies on this album, but it is not saccharine. The riffs are true and heavy with just enough prog to satisfy my nerd factor. There are passages that feel a bit “dream theater-y” without overreaching to be pretentiously epic like DT can do. However, the key to this album is the lyrical content, which is dripping with meaning and personal backstory but that is relatable to most. If you are in the mood to think and ponder life and death, this could be the album to slip into. This is more hard rock than metal in my view. I enjoyed it, in as much as one can enjoy songs about death can, which in my case is pretty much all the time. This album drops today so go find it on whatever musical platform you use that I refuse to promote.