Review by Rick Eaglestone for MPM
20 Years, Two Decades of atmospheric fury but now with something to prove — Winterfylleth have arrived at their landmark anniversary with their ninth album, but The Unyielding Season is not a celebration.
It is a confrontation. Where its predecessor The Imperious Horizon surveyed a distant malevolence on the horizon — cold, calculating, patient — this record is the moment that force finally arrives at the door. Where that album watched and waited, this one ignites. And it burns accordingly.
The album opens with the hard-hitting Heroes of a Hundred Fields, the band’s choice of debut single and not only full of intent but framed in the language of the battlefield as a vehicle for something altogether contemporary — soldiers uniting to resist an oppressive force, which Naughton has made clear is a pointed metaphor for the erosion of personal freedoms and the quiet dismantling of the rights we hold. It is a tremendous opening statement. This is followed by the darker and more imposing Echoes in the After, for me the album’s first genuinely head-turning moment — adapted from Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century poem ‘Since That to Death’ and written as Winterfylleth’s direct response to the deliberate felling of the Sycamore Gap tree beside Hadrian’s Wall in 2023, a tree that held personal significance for the band as the visual inspiration for the cover of their 2018 album The Hallowing of Heirdom. The lyric is a lament from nature to itself, and it is an earworm of the most devastating kind.
Before going further, it would be wrong not to address the cover because The Unyielding Season is one of the most visually striking statements in Winterfylleth’s catalogue. The artwork, designed by Dan Capp with landscape photography by Simon Lucas himself, pivots emphatically away from the pastoral and ancient — the misty forests and stoic winter silences of previous records — and into something altogether more incendiary. Flame dominates the composition, consuming and atmospheric, radiating an orange and deep red heat that feels almost violent against the surrounding darkness. This is not the cool blue grey of The Imperious Horizon which wore its menace like frost on stone — this is heat, this is urgency, this is something that cannot be turned back. The land that Winterfylleth have always championed and mourned is now the thing burning. There is a precedent in metal for artwork this tonally loaded — think of Bathory’s Blood Fire Death, or Primordial’s The Gathering Wilderness — covers that function as a thesis statement about the world the music inhabits. The Unyielding Season belongs in that company.
A Hollow Existence opens with slow, towering riffs and choral vocalisations before igniting with biting ire — a sudden galvanising eruption where the keyboards become increasingly prevalent, sometimes leading the melody and giving the track an almost cinematic feel. This is quintessential Winterfylleth and if this album ever has an accompanying live visual presentation this is the track that ought to frame it. This is complimented by Perdition’s Flame which accelerates with unapologetic ferocity — the keyboard work used not as atmosphere but as momentum — before the album’s true centrepiece arrives. The Unyielding Season title track runs to eight minutes and is the album’s most multifaceted achievement: a measured, intriguing opening gives way to poignant, stirring riffs that weave the narrative forward, and if the songwriting on this track were a restaurant I would be throwing Michelin stars at it. Russell Dobson’s lead guitar work is glorious throughout. The more you listen to this album the more you get from it — I have gone to bed thinking of it and woken up wanting to play it again.
Unspoken Elegy, featuring is of the album’s most quietly devastating moments — the cello carrying the weight of something ancient and unresolved, the acoustic guitar beneath it shaping a grief too deep for the full band to contain. This is not a breather. It is a burial. In Ashen Wake opens the second half on a measured burn, building its case with absolute conviction before committing to something enormous, whilst Towards Elysium anchors the record’s penultimate full song in something muscular and driving, the riff work punching with a directness that recalls the band’s earlier output, sinister melodic lines keeping the atmosphere dark even as the rhythm section drives forward with something close to exuberance. The second instrumental Where Dreams Once Grew then serves as the album’s final pause before the closing bonus track — more contemplative and searching than its counterpart, a question rather than a statement, and it makes what follows feel genuinely significant.
Now, one more thing in relation to this offering — if you look through the track list you will notice a cover of Enchantment by Paradise Lost. The opening track of their 1995 masterpiece Draconian Times — with those unmistakable Andrew Holdsworth piano notes, Nick Holmes’ gothic baritone, and Gregor Mackintosh’s guitar work that set the precedent for a generation of imitators — is a bold and deeply considered choice to close on. The connection between Winterfylleth and Paradise Lost is not merely geographical, though there is something quietly resonant about two English bands separated by decades and several hundred miles sharing the same gravitational pull toward grief, landscape, and the music that ordinary language cannot hold. Mark Deeks makes admirable use of clean vocals throughout, the band perform it with clear reverence rather than reinvention, and if anybody has the right to bow before that particular altar it is Winterfylleth. It is the sound of two rivers arriving at the same estuary — different journeys, the same destination, and a fitting tribute to end on.
The more you listen to The Unyielding Season, the more you get from it. The production from Chris Fielding is the finest work the band has committed to tape in years — everything vivid and present, the guitar textures elevated, the quieter passages allowed to breathe. Winterfylleth are celebrating twenty years not with a retrospective but with something new, urgent, and alive, and for a lot of us this will be a career-peak statement, but for some this album may be the gateway — and if so then this is not a bad place to start at all. It is fiery where The Imperious Horizon was icy. It is a confrontation where that album was a warning. Something is being lost and Winterfylleth refuse to let it go quietly — and The Unyielding Season does not flinch. It answers.
The Unyielding Season Track Listing:
1. Heroes of a Hundred Fields
2. Echoes in the After
3. A Hollow Existence
4. Perdition’s Flame
5. The Unyielding Season
6. Unspoken Elegy
7. In Ashen Wake
8. Towards Elysium
9. Where Dreams Once Grew
10. Enchantment
Line-up:
Chris Naughton – Vocals, Guitars
Russell Dobson – Lead Guitar, Backing Vocals
Mark Doyle – Bass, Backing Vocals
Mark Deeks – Keyboards, Synths, Backing Vocals
Simon Lucas – Drums
Website: https://www.winterfylleth.com/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6rOLHKoJGhOFqBiXwq3tXu
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/winterfylleth/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Winterfylleth/
Bandcamp: https://winterfylleth.bandcamp.com/
10/10
