ALBUM REVIEW – MIRADOR – ”MIRADOR“

WORDS HARRY K

Mirador - Mirador

Release Date: 19th September 2025

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"myth-drenched blues and sky-splitting riffs from a new rock super-force"

Rock has a habit of eating its young, but every so often a band arrives that feels like it could smash down the mausoleum doors and breathe new life into the corpse. Enter MIRADOR, the fire-breathing collaboration between Jake Kiszka – the Greta Van Fleet guitar hero unshackled from retro pigeonholes – and Chris Turpin, the magnetic voice and songsmith behind Ida Mae. With London underground lifers Mikey Sorbello (drums) and Nick Pini (bass/keys) completing the lineup, their debut is a swaggering, myth-soaked collision of folk, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll that sounds like it was carved from stone and then struck by lightning.

Recorded live in barely two weeks with Grammy-magnet Dave Cobb in Savannah, Georgia, Mirador refuses polish. Instead, it drips sweat, wine and folklore. It’s a record that reaches backwards into the guts of Delta blues and British balladry while blasting forwards with riffs built for arenas.

Opener ‘Feels Like Gold’ detonates like Zeppelin tearing through a juke-joint séance, all fretboard fireworks and hollered refrains. ‘Ashes To Earth’ snarls with Sabbath-worthy weight before dissolving into spectral harmonies. Then there’s ‘Must I Go Bound’ – the album’s ghostly centrepiece. A centuries-old folk lament is reimagined as a smouldering acoustic incantation, with Kiszka and Turpin trading vocals like doomed lovers singing across a battlefield. It’s restrained but devastating, and it proves MIRADOR aren’t just here to riff themselves into oblivion – they can hush a room too.

The whole thing bristles with chemistry. Kiszka’s solos are less peacock-strut than incantation, while Turpin’s grainy, weather-worn tone keeps the band rooted in human heartbreak rather than rock-god cosplay. Sorbello and Pini, meanwhile, turn in performances that are as muscular as they are nimble, propelling the songs with swing rather than stomp.

Sure, at times the album can feel like it’s balancing on a knife-edge between homage and reinvention – there are ghosts of The Clash, Zeppelin, even Fairport Convention in here – but MIRADOR pull it off with enough conviction to make the lineage feel earned.

If Greta Van Fleet sometimes felt trapped by their own mythologising, MIRADOR blow the doors off. Mirador is not just a debut, it’s a mission statement: a reminder that rock still has blood in its veins, teeth in its grin, and a future in its bones.

MIRADOR’s debut is thunder, folklore and sweat bottled in 12 tracks – the kind of record that makes you believe, briefly, that rock ‘n’ roll might just save your soul after all.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

TRACK LISTING

1. Feels Like Gold

   
   

   2 Roving Blade

   
   

   3 Raider

   
   

   4 Must I Go Bound

   
   

   5 Fortune’s Fate

   
   

   6 Blood and Custard

   
   

   7 Dream Seller

   
   

   8 Ten Thousand More to Ride

   
   

   9 Ashes to Earth

   
   

   10 Heels of the Hunt

   
   

   11 Skyway Drifter

   
   

   12 Hymnal I