Gaerea

GAEREA is nothing short of a beautiful enigma rooted in musical extremity and utter passion. In under a decade, the masked collective, born in the Portuguese town of Porto, has navigated countless darkened shades of metal to arrive at their fifth album and Century Media debut, Loss. “We’ve done what we’ve always done, which is follow our instincts,” says GAEREA’s anonymous vocalist. “Yet, something tells me, that on this new record, there’s elements that both our new and old fans will love, but it’s not exactly what they’ll expect us to do.”

Loss is the sound of GAEREA continuing to define and redefine itself, incorporating elements of the band’s post-black metal past with the sharpened sonics and haunting melodies that coalesced spectacularly with 2024’s album, Coma. Recorded in early 2025 in Portugal with long-running collaborator Miguel Teroso at Demigod Recordings, Loss finds GAEREA emerging from creative chrysalis and bursting into something as engaging as it is unexpected. From the bombast that opens the record with “Luminary” to the album’s elegiac closer, “Stardust”, you can hear every member pushing their personal and creative limits. There’s singing. There are choruses as catchy and passionate as the best rock and metal songs. Yet, through the emotionally charged din, it’s unmistakably GAEREA.

“We’re not about to apologize for simply being who we are,” says the band’s vocalist of the direction taken on GAEREA’s latest endeavor, their first with the same lineup and creative nucleus of members as the record before. “When this band started in my bedroom, it was my means of personal expression, without putting barriers in front of myself and that’s still the way I approach the music. You may not expect a dark pop song or singing everywhere, but there’s still blast beats everywhere and black metal sections here and there. We can’t be expected to be the same people we were when we started this band ten years ago.”

Indeed, GAEREA has built its reputation on a blackened blueprint. Choosing a self-spawned name with no connection to any convenient metal tropes, GAEREA became a vehicle for its members to explore the frayed edges of the human condition without self-imposed limitations. “Up until Mirage (2022), it’s true, we wanted to be this super aggressive black metal band like Watain, or maybe one day be able to play with Behemoth,” says the frontman of GAEREA’s earliest utterances and albums like 2018’s Unsettling Whispers or 2020’s Limbo. “We love those bands, but we didn’t want to become the next Behemoth. We wanted to be the next GAEREA.”

GAEREA is one of the rare bands where the boundaries between life and art not merely intertwine but forge a totality that you not only hear on record but one that also plays out in the band’s explosive live performance. Their combination of onstage rapture and sonic spirituality invites comparisons to kindred souls like Neurosis or Amen Ra. Swathed entirely in black with their distinct sigil occupying the space where their faces should be,
there’s both a totality and anonymity that’s transcendent and binding when the fivesome takes stage; a distinct, hermetic code that connects all aspects of the band from the musical to the spiritual. “It’s not about the individual or seeing our faces,” says the vocalist. “I don’t want people to know me. I want people to connect with the music and the lyrics that I’m singing and apply that to their own lives.” GAEREA has christened their audience “The Vortex Society”, a collective consciousness that draws inspiration from the band’s unrestrained explorations into the human psyche.

“[Loss] touches me on an individual level more than anything we’ve done before,” the vocalist admits. “It goes into the emotions that shaped me to become an artist. Most of the record deals with trapped memories in time.” The album’s jarring first single, “Submerged” is precisely that – the howl of a singular being submerged in an ocean of thoughts. ‘’Stardust’ is about losing a close friend as a teenager,” he admits. “This record has helped me cope with some of those thoughts, some of the things I buried throughout the years.”

While GAEREA has long stood on the edges of darkness, their message has always had a sense of transcendence and positivity. While tracks like “Hellbound” or “Uncontrolled” are rooted in a jumble of confusion, guilt and self-admitted imposter syndrome, when the album arrives at its centerpiece moment, “Phoenix”, it’s a moment of pure ascendency. “There’s a line in ‘Hellbound’, where the lyric is, ‘I wear my sins as a second skin,’” says the frontman. “There’s something that corrodes you from the inside, that burns. This album is my attempt to escape that damage and rise above all the pain and confusion.”

The distance GAEREA has come since emerging from Portugal’s microscopic metal underground proves what a force they have become. “In Portugal, it was only Moonspell, who we really had to look up to,” the frontman admits. “We’re lucky to have had their friendship and respect and maybe, one day, they’ll pass the torch to us! I think that’s where our sense of imposter syndrome comes come.”Past tours, supporting the likes of Gaahl’s Wyrd in Europe, Rotting Christ and Zeal & Ardor in North America and their most recent European tour as main support to Sweden’s Orbit Culture have shown their unique ability to bridge artistry and extremity. Vaunted festival appearances including Wacken, Inferno and Summer Breeze have become ritualistic triumphs for the band, performing their spiritual exorcisms in front of thousands of fans.

Loss is the sound of the masked specters of GAEREA laying their souls bare. Musically and emotionally, they’re opening themselves up and bringing a decade’s worth of musical and personal soul-rending into sharper focus and becoming a genre-of-one in the process. “We’re not a black metal band anymore, if we ever were,” states the vocalist. “We always have been compared to hardcore bands and post-hardcore and shoegaze and post-this and post-that. We’re slowly finding our way as a band but just as importantly, as people, but the DNA is always there. This is GAEREA.”