ALBUM REVIEW - Inkubus Sukkubus – Eternal Monsters

Rick E
46 minutes ago
6 min read

WORDS RICK E

ETERNAL MONSTERS

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The darkness is eternal, the monsters are magnificent – Inkubus Sukkubus remain utterly, irreplaceably themselves.

Over three and a half decades into a career that has refused every invitation to compromise or conform, Inkubus Sukkubus have become something genuinely rare in the landscape of British alternative music – a band whose commitment to their vision has never once wavered, whose identity has remained as singular and as fiercely their own on their twenty-eighth studio album as it was when Candia and Tony McKormack first brought the whole thing into existence in 1989. Eternal Monsters is not a record that asks for your patience while it finds its feet. It arrives fully formed, fully charged, and immediately, unmistakably itself.

I will be honest with you – I have been on some version of this journey with Inkubus Sukkubus for long enough to know what this band means to a very specific community of people, and to understand that community’s devotion is not casual or arbitrary. It is the product of decades of music that has consistently made the darkness feel like home, which has treated paganism, vampirology, folk horror, and the deeper wells of gothic tradition not as aesthetic props but as genuine spiritual and artistic commitments. Every album in that catalogue carries the same conviction. The question with Eternal Monsters was never whether that conviction would be present. The question was whether the songwriting would match it. It does, and then some.

What strikes you immediately about this record is the energy. Eternal Monsters is a record that crackles with life and forward momentum from its very first seconds, and it is difficult not to hear in it the accumulated force of a band who have absolutely nothing left to prove to anyone and are therefore entirely free to simply do exactly what they do best. Tony McKormack’s guitar work throughout is, frankly, extraordinary – melodic, atmospheric, precisely deployed, and with a tonal authority that few guitarists operating in this genre have ever matched. Candia’s voice, meanwhile, remains one of the great underappreciated instruments in British rock music: expressive, powerful, hypnotic in the way she inhabits a lyric, and entirely capable of moving from tender vulnerability to commanding authority within the space of a single phrase. And Roland Link holds the entire architecture together on bass with a quiet mastery that the casual listener will perhaps not notice and should.

The record ranges across the full breadth of the Inkubus Sukkubus thematic universe – vampires, witchcraft, folk horror, dark romance, the natural world, and its cycles, the sacred and the profane bound up together in a way that is entirely their own. Thirty-five years in and there is still no one else doing quite this. There never has been.

She’s a Killer opens the record and within thirty seconds it is obvious this is not going to be a comfortable or predictable ride – McKormack’s driving, purposeful riff has a magnetic authority and Candia’s vocal delivery is immediately commanding, dark-edged and theatrical in equal measure, with a melodic hook at its heart that is absolutely impossible to shake. Fall to Darkness follows and is the album’s most expansive piece, a six-minute track that earns every second of its runtime through distinct movements handled with the structural confidence of a band who know instinctively how to take a listener on a journey. McKormack’s guitar work in the later stages is a masterclass in atmosphere and restraint. Give to me the Fire of the Night is where the record’s pagan heart beats most warmly and most openly – there is something almost ritualistic about how it unfolds, a sense of genuine invocation, and the layering of Candia’s voice against Tony’s guitar and keyboard textures creates the kind of rich, enveloping atmosphere that makes you reach for a darker room and a single candle.

Vampires of the Sea shifts the emotional register entirely – there is a coastal, elemental quality here that draws together the band’s twin obsessions with vampirology and the natural world into a single piece of music with real creative intelligence, dark and romantic in the best possible sense of both words.

Angel of Your Love is the record’s most openly romantic moment and is all the more powerful for the unguarded directness with which it wears that quality – Candia’s vocal performance is tender and affecting, and this is the song that reminds you that beneath all the darkness and ceremony and folklore there is a profound belief in love as both its own kind of magic and its own kind of terror. Then there is the title track itself, Eternal Monsters, and I say this having listened to this album more times than I am prepared to admit – it is the beating, pulsing, undying heart of this record. A declaration of identity and permanence, a statement about what it means to have existed in the shadows for thirty-five years and emerged not diminished but clarified. McKormack’s arrangement is at its most dramatic, and Candia’s vocal in the central chorus is simply one of the finest moments of singing on any Inkubus Sukkubus record. The lifeblood of this album, no question.

Now She Has Fallen brings an elegiac, grief-edged quality to proceedings that sits beautifully in the context of what surrounds it, and Roland Link’s bass work here deserves particular recognition – the melodic warmth he brings to the lower register lifts the track’s sadder passages considerably. The Easy Way Out is in many ways the album’s most satisfying tonal contrast – there is an urgency and harder edge here that harks back to the band’s earliest material while feeling entirely contemporary in its execution, and the dynamic between guitar and vocal is at its most electric. Just when the album has settled into a certain mood, this arrives and recalibrates everything. Harvest Time is the pagan calendar rendered in sound, and it is gorgeous – cyclical and ceremonial, rooted and genuine, with a warmth to the arrangement that makes it one of the most immediately appealing pieces on the record.

Dragged Away by the Vampires of the Night is the album’s most overtly gothic and operatic moment and it is an absolute delight – the darkly playful menace in both lyric and arrangement is irresistible, and it demonstrates once again that this band understand how to balance the serious and the celebratory in a way very few contemporaries have managed. In the Field of the Living Dead inhabits the folk horror corner of the Inkubus Sukkubus universe with real conviction, and there is a cinematic, narrative quality to the lyric that rewards careful listening – the details accumulate, the atmosphere deepens, and by its close you are somewhere that feels a very long way from wherever you started. Lovers & Monsters is the penultimate statement and the one that most completely captures the duality at the heart of everything the band has ever done, drawing together melodic and atmospheric threads from across the album’s runtime in a way that feels genuinely summative. Candia’s vocal performance is extraordinary.

And then The End arrives, and every time it does it achieves what very few album closers ever manage: it makes the silence that follows feel like part of the music. Brief, considered, devastatingly well-placed. A perfect closer to a very fine album.

What makes Eternal Monsters such a triumph is its absolute and unwavering commitment to being entirely, unapologetically itself. This is a band that has never made a record to satisfy an algorithm or hedge against commercial uncertainty, and that freedom – hard won over thirty-five years of independent creative existence – reverberates through every single track. There is no filler here, no coasting, no sense of a band going through the motions. There is only the sustained, focused expression of a unique artistic vision by three musicians who know exactly what they are doing and have never been more in command of how to do it.

“We started this band to be the vehicle in which the celebration of the Pagan experience could be conveyed – thirty-five years later, that’s still exactly what this is.” –

TONY McKORMACK

4/5

Eternal Monsters – FULL TRACK LIST

1. She’s a Killer

2. Fall to Darkness

3. Give to me the Fire of the Night

4. Vampires of the Sea

5. Angel of Your Love

6. Eternal Monsters

7. Now She Has Fallen

8. The Easy Way Out

9. Harvest Time