There’s a particular kind of madness that grips you when an album you weren’t even sure you’d love starts hijacking your playlist without permission. EPICA have always been on my radar: one of those bands you respect, occasionally return to, and genuinely enjoy without ever quite falling down the rabbit hole. Then “Aspiral” came along and quietly moved in. I’ve spun it more times in the past few days than I have anything in their back catalog, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.
Part of the answer lies in what the Dutch sextet quietly changed. Their ninth studio album, released in April 2025 via Nuclear Blast, is leaner and more urgent than its predecessors. The orchestral scaffolding is scaled back, the choir used more sparingly, which gives the album a kind of live, electric energy that previous records sometimes buried under their own grandeur. It hits differently.
The songs feel designed to grab you before they overwhelm you, which is not always how Epica has operated. It doesn’t sacrifice the cinematic sweep that defines the band at their best, the album still sounds like a film score that decided to grow teeth, but it trusts the songs themselves more. The riffs hit harder for it. Simone Simons soars higher for it.
And Simone is, frankly, the case that closes the argument. I’ve always acknowledged that she’s exceptional. On Aspiral I found myself actually stopping to listen, which is a different thing entirely. There’s an emotional restraint she brings to this record that catches you off guard; moments of quiet fragility that land harder precisely because the bombast surrounding them is so controlled. Mark Jansen‘s growls remain one of the genre’s great contrasts to that beauty, and the rhythm section hits with a tightness that keeps even the album’s most theatrical moments grounded.
Whether Aspiral converts the skeptics is one question. Whether it deepens the devotion of the already-converted is another. For the people in between, those of us who’ve kept a respectful distance while always knowing this band was operating on a different level, it might just be the record that closes the gap. I went in a casual admirer and came out considerably less casual. Make of that what you will.
