Deeply moving and heavy on grandiose atmosphere, soaring vocals and crushing riffs, Season’s End’s debut album The Failing Light elegantly demonstrates that you need not travel to Scandinavia to find perfectly crafted symphonic metal. Having spent the last three years honing a sound that transcends the boundaries of gothic metal, this Hampshire based sextet have created an album that is both astoundingly fresh and incredibly mature; qualities that can be attributed to the band’s refusal to resort to tired clichés. “We always strive to stay true to ourselves when writing,” states lead vocalist Becki Clark, “we don’t deliberately try and conform to any stereotypes or conventions; we make the music that we’d like to hear”. It is this attitude that truly sets Season’s End apart in a genre that is all too often characterised by rigidly set formulae and has helped propel them into the collective consciousness of Britain’s burgeoning underground metal scene.