Review of Season of Melancholy - In Sleep
There is something slightly strange about In Sleep. On the surface, Season of Melancholy have made a record that is remarkably easy to get into. The songs are melodic, the choruses arrive where you expect them, the guitars have enough weight to satisfy the metal crowd, and the post-punk and gothic elements give everything a darker colour. It doesn't exactly demand that you decode it. But then you look at where these songs came from. The material was written between 2018 and 2024, across a period that changed life in Ukraine in ways nobody could have predicted. The band had enough material for a new album just before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Recording plans were then stretched across years of air-raid alerts, missile attacks, power cuts, line-up changes and all the usual chaos that comes with trying to make music when normal life has stopped being particularly normal. That doesn't automatically make an album good, of course. But it does make In Sleep more intere...
