The forthcoming sophomore effort from The Silver— Looking Glass Hymnal Blue [pre-order]— delivers far more than a compelling listen; it is an invitation, an exercise in the sacred, a hand reaching out to pull you within your own depths.
If the band’s 2021’s LP Ward of Roses set the stage with its emotive pairings of black and post-black metal, melodic riffing, and the flair of a vintage 80’s wine, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue has arrived to fulfill Ward’s promise: dazzle its audience, incite tears of both ecstasy and terror to carry them far beyond this world, and stretch them nearly to breaking by the curtain’s fall.
The album evokes the grandiosity of the opera with its stunning epics inlaid throughout it like crown jewels, and its latest single / music video for “When the Moon is Three” fully illustrates The Silver‘s magnificence.
N. Duchemin comments on the track: “‘When the Moon is Three‘ walks the listener through worlds of discovery; facing the unknown, the initiate dons the mask of fear as they are plunged through the hidden world of the mind. Upon returning from their journey, they are forever changed.”
Looking Glass Hymnal Blue is a towing achievement for The Silver, mining the furthest depths of its players both musically and emotionally. The compositions display staggeringly ambitious strides in both craft and vision, while lyrically, the band excavates their own haunted interiors with the hope of inciting the audience to do the same.
Asked about the process of creating this new record, guitarist/vocalist V states: “our prior release, Ward of Roses, was largely a leap of faith into musical exploration. While we had all been friends for years, we hadn’t worked together much musically and began the project with little more than a shared vision that, while profound, was largely obscured from us. So much of that record was real-time discovery, mapping out the dark corners of our sound (and selves) as we went along, realizing through the very act of creation what we were capable of and what we really wanted as a band. With Looking Glass Hymnal Blue, we already had our blueprint, so from there it became a question of how to fully explore what we set down on Ward.
As with all of our projects, the answer was to make it bigger, more ambitious, more fearless–which is really to say, more distinctly us. We wanted to carve out music ornate and spacious enough to carry the weight of the concepts we were exploring and to elevate everything to be nearly mythic in scope.” And mythic it is, thanks in no small part to acclaimed artist Paul Romano who fully designed, produced and created the album art and packaging for the record. Taken together, the art and musical compositions form a fully unified aesthetic world, with Romano drawing on motifs of mirrors, refraction, the double, and a plethora of mythological creatures and symbolism to reinforce the record’s lyrical themes.
While The Silver prefers to keep such matters open to the listener’s interpretation, N. offers a few breadcrumbs on the lyrical trail: “Lyrically, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue is something of a beast of many faces; like the hydra of mythology. Each song (or head), is a representation of internal reflection, musing or suffering. The words speak, in abstract, on battles with ideas of self; attempts to overcome or change the lens of the mind, or memories of a walk into the realm of dreams.” V adds: “to listen to Looking Glass Hymnal Blue is to gaze into the mirror, into its multifarious reflections, to confront your own distorted shape and perhaps catch that small flash of self that can only be gathered through peripheral vision, through an amalgamation of the whole. Each song is both a hymn and a key, a rite to trespass beyond the door within.”
Recorded by the band alongside engineer Richie DeVon in Philadelphia, and mixed and mastered by Damian Herring, Looking Glass Hymnal Blue is slated for release on March 20, 2026 through Gilead Media. Pre-order the LP here.
The Silver, live:
January 14-16 2027 Richmond, VA — Heart of Winter Fest
Looking Glass Hymnal Blue, track list:
- Looking Glass Hymnal Blue
- Two Candles
- Memorias
- Tendrils
- When the Moon is Three
- The Demon Bridge
- Twilight of Love
- My Lone Dark Lantern
