Italy’s Walk in Darkness fifth record, Gods Don’t Take Calls, drops like a weight you feel in your chest before you even know it’s there. This isn’t gothic metal as you remember it - there’s no safe blueprint here. It’s heavier, more cinematic, more… alive in a way that makes you uncomfortable and curious at the same time.
The guitars іщгтві like granite but bend into these strange, almost cinematic shapes. Keys and strings swell around them, but never in a way that softens the impact - this is grandeur with teeth. There’s tension all over this album, a sense that something is always about to unravel. Nicoletta’s voice is the only human face in this ritual, and she carries it with a kind of raw, lived-in authority. You hear everything - anger, grief, wonder, resignation - and it lands, hard.
The rest of the band wears masks, hooded and anonymous, and it works. The music becomes bigger than the players. You’re not thinking about who’s behind the drums or bass; you’re thinking about where this sound exists, and what it’s trying to tell you. And it does tell you things - about mortality, about ambition, about the slow erosion of faith. It’s not literal. It’s a feeling, a mythology made from riffs and orchestration and a strange, heavy silence between notes.
This album doesn’t give you the expected highs and lows of standard gothic metal. It’s patient, cinematic, and occasionally jarring. Sometimes it leans into symphonic swells that could score a gothic cathedral at midnight. Sometimes it grinds down into something almost tribal, but always precise, never indulgent. You feel like you’re walking through a dream that’s not entirely yours.
Walk in Darkness has long been a band that focuses on concept and universe-building, rather than just songs. Gods Don’t Take Calls continues that, but it feels sharper, more distilled. The album isn’t about moments to pick apart - it’s about surrendering to an atmosphere, a story, a philosophy. Listening to it, you remember that metal can be something more than catharsis or adrenaline - it can be a map of shadows, of human fragility, of the void.
If you come to this record expecting cliches, you’ll get lost. If you let it pull you in, you’ll walk with darkness and not want to leave.
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Thanks to Grand Sounds PR.
