With their fourth album, masked black-metal squad Gaerea have created their most personal and intimate album yet. On Coma, the Portuguese musicians—who prefer anonymity, even though their identities are widely known—have crafted a concept album about a mysterious aspect of the subconscious. “All of these tracks could be memories, thoughts or even ramblings that go on inside the mind of someone who is trapped in the state of coma,” Gaerea’s vocalist and lyricist tells Apple Music. “Everything is happening in the mind of someone who is not exactly alive or dead.” Stylistically, the band takes several leaps outside of the established black-metal realm with clean vocals and more emotive lyrics. “I don’t think this is a black-metal album at all,” he says. “We wanted to explore new ground, other song structures, other ways of singing, other ways of playing drums. We don’t want to stagnate. We’re trying to evolve into something else. But we also don’t feel like we belong to the genre we’ve always fit into. Or at least not completely anymore.” It’s not just the music that’s different. For a band that’s always dug deep, lyrically speaking, Coma goes even further beneath the surface. “I won’t say it’s a more mature album, like all the bands ramble about,” he says. “We just wanted to show a bit more of ourselves as human beings. I think it’s a way more emotional record in that sense.” Below, he comments on each track. “The Poet’s Ballet” “With [Gaerea’s 2022 album] Mirage, I was always talking about how selfish the creation process is, so I decided to write a song exclusively about that. ‘The Poet’s Ballet’ is that song. The creation process is beautiful, unique, cathartic and dramatic for me personally, but also selfish because you can never reproduce the same thing ever again. It’s also selfish because when people hear your song, hopefully they will relate to it. But how they do that is always based on their own feelings and experiences. And then it’s not yours anymore—it’s theirs. In terms of the musical approach, it’s the moment when people hear clean vocals in our record for the very first time.” “Hope Shatters” “I’m not going to say we knew a lot of people would like this song, but yeah, we kind of did. It kind of resembles ‘Salve’, which is probably one of our biggest songs. It’s aggressive, it’s melodic, but it’s very pounding and groovy and explodes in the end. Lyrically, it’s as if this person who is in a coma is flying through the big city and watching all the neon, kind of like a Blade Runner scenario where we created all this technology to serve us, but I think most of the time we are the ones serving technology and always cutting short on some of the aspects of our lives.” “Suspended” “This is a retake of a song we did before, which was ‘To Ain’ from the Limbo album. It’s a song about the falling man from 9/11 and those beautiful photos—if we can call them that—of the people falling or letting themselves go in that moment. I wanted to revisit that, because it’s the most striking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Of course, we can’t ever know how those people felt—or how their relatives felt—at that moment when they just jumped. But this is a song imagining what those last moments were.” “World Ablaze” “This was the last track we wrote for the album. As we were recording it, we felt we should either go full nuts with the song and make it the first single with the best video we can produce—or take it off the record completely. Because it doesn’t really fit the album, if you listen closely. I think it’s a very bold track for a black-metal band to release, and we saw a lot of people getting frustrated about it. Which is great, because it’s exactly what we wanted in a sense. We wanted something people were not expecting at all.” “Coma” “This is the song that explains the whole record, basically. I was thinking about how to write a song about someone in a coma, but they’re still conscious of it. Because if there’s no consciousness, there won’t be a song. So, this is a bit like waking up in a dark room and seeing the whole world around you, but you can’t really figure out if it’s reality, if it’s memories, if it’s your imagination or just your lost dreams in life. It deals with that anxiety of trying to figure out if you’re really here or not, or if this is the afterlife—and whatever the afterlife might look like.” “Wilted Flower” “This song has a bit of the not-belonging-anywhere kind of situation. That's why it has this title. It's a beautiful flower, but it’s starting to rot. It still has its beauty, but there’s some sort of mould or cancer in it. It still has its smell and its soft touch, but it just doesn't belong there, or there’s something eerie about it. Sometimes that’s how I feel as a human being or as a creator. There’re all these beautiful moments in life, but sometimes I just feel that imposter syndrome, like maybe this is not what I was supposed to do with my life. I think it’s very normal with creators to feel like that—at least, I know a lot of them that do.” “Reborn” “It has to do with the fact that we were a very different band on Mirage. We had some changes inside the band, as a lot of people know, but we don’t reveal it because of the band we are. But I think it’s important to open yourself to these emotions. If you’re feeling frail, I think it’s important to explore it and not try to hide it. With Coma, it’s important for us to reveal what’s happened, and ‘Reborn’ is how we feel with this record. We lost people and some things that were very important to us, and everything could’ve fallen apart at some point. We even thought maybe we should start over and do something else. But we pushed through and made ourselves stronger.” “Shapeshifter” “I think ‘Shapeshifter’ deals a bit with the same emotions of ‘Wilted Flower.’ It's the same thing for ‘Unknown’, too. It deals with the personae and the social masks that sometimes we frame ourselves with in some situations, when we want to please others or belong to a certain group or just in dealing with society. Besides in our own bedrooms, I think we always tend to not be truly ourselves in those moments. This is something we explored a lot back in the Unsettling Whispers era, about how fake I feel about myself and others as I put these masks on to deal with other people.” “Unknown” “In my teenage years, I lost someone very dear to me. And most of the things that I have in life are things that I didn’t dream about having. I didn’t even know they could be done. But this person that I lost, it was his dream to be an artist and perform to thousands of people and play festivals and record all these songs and albums. So, ‘Unknown’ is about discovering this façade of mine, the feeling that I’m living a life that wasn’t meant to be mine—or living a life that was meant to be lived by someone else. Maybe I’m living someone else’s dream, even though I feel like I was born to do this. But maybe I’m doing this because someone else is not able to, because they were lost in time.” “Kingdom of Thorns” “This is a song about sacrifice. We all shaped our lives for everything we do inside the band. Being Portuguese, we only have a couple of bands that everybody knows from my country. It’s not because there’s not a lot of quality—it’s just because there’s a lack of commitment. Sometimes we get a lot of hate when I say these things, but it’s true. All of this to say that for us to make our first tours and buy our first van and do all these things, we had to sacrifice so much in our early twenties. I sacrificed friendships. I sacrificed a past relationship. I sacrificed moments with family. And I think all these things carved a lot of who I am. It makes us who we are as artists.”