Melting Sun: How Lantlôs Shed Their Old Skin and Emerged Transformed

When Melting Sun arrived in 2014, it didn’t just mark a new chapter for Lantlôs—it closed an entire book. The album stands as a deliberate severing from the band’s black-metal lineage, replacing frostbitten atmospheres with radiant melancholy, shoegaze textures, and an almost physical sense of warmth. It’s not merely a stylistic pivot; it’s a philosophical one.

To understand Melting Sun, you have to trace the long arc of transformation that brought Lantlôs there—and then follow the album track by track, where that transformation fully reveals itself.

Origins: Isolation, Atmosphere, and Black Metal DNA

Lantlôs began as a largely solitary project by Markus Siegenhort, emerging from the late-2000s European post-black metal wave. Early releases leaned heavily on extended compositions, washed-out distortion, and emotionally distant vocals—music that felt less performed and more endured.

The early records are steeped in:

• Hypnotic repetition

• Minimalist melodic development

• A sense of isolation rather than aggression

This era aligned Lantlôs loosely with contemporaries like Alcest, yet with a colder, more detached emotional palette.

Cracks in the Ice: Agape as a Turning Point

By the time Agape surfaced, the first fractures in the black-metal shell were already visible. Clean vocals, prominent basslines, and a more pronounced emotional directness suggested Siegenhort was less interested in genre allegiance and more concerned with feeling.

Agape still carried distortion and density, but:

• Songs were more concise

• Melody became foregrounded

• Vulnerability replaced abstraction

This was Lantlôs beginning to shed the past, even if the process wasn’t complete.

Melting Sun: Light as a Concept, Not Just a Sound

With Melting Sun, Lantlôs stepped fully into the light—and did so unapologetically.

Gone are blast beats, shrieked vocals, and black-metal tropes. In their place:

• Shoegaze-infused guitar layers

• Dream-pop dynamics

• Warm, resonant bass and restrained percussion

• Clean, emotive vocals that feel human rather than spectral

The album’s defining achievement is its sense of warmth. This is heavy music that doesn’t crush—it envelops.

Track-by-Track: The Melting Sun Cycle

Rather than a conventional set of songs, Melting Sun unfolds as a continuous suite, each movement deepening the album’s emotional arc.

Melting Sun I

A slow ignition. Clean guitars shimmer against restrained rhythms, immediately signaling that this is not the Lantlôs of old. The mood is tentative but hopeful—light breaking through cloud cover.

Melting Sun II

The album’s pulse strengthens here. Basslines become more assertive, and the layered guitars swell with shoegaze influence. There’s a sense of motion, like drifting forward without resistance.

Melting Sun III

One of the most emotionally resonant movements. The vocals sit gently within the mix, conveying vulnerability rather than dominance. This track feels introspective—quietly searching, never dramatic.

Melting Sun IV

The emotional centerpiece of the album. Dynamics rise and fall with patience, letting repetition do the heavy lifting. It’s here that Melting Sun fully establishes its identity as emotional weight without extremity.

Melting Sun V

A subtle shift inward. The arrangements thin slightly, emphasizing atmosphere over momentum. This track feels like reflection—processing what’s already been revealed.

Melting Sun VI

The closest the album comes to resolution. The warmth intensifies, not through volume, but through harmonic richness. It carries a sense of acceptance rather than climax, closing the core album on a note of calm arrival.

The Artbook Coda: Melting Sun VII

Included exclusively with the Artbook Edition, “Melting Sun VII” functions as an epilogue rather than an appendix.

Where the main album ends in gentle resolution, VII feels like the lingering glow after sunset.

Towering, but gentle in structure, it doesn’t introduce new ideas so much as distill them—stripping the album’s themes down to their emotional essence. Melting Sun VII reinforces that this project was never about songs in isolation, but about a complete emotional environment.

In retrospect, its inclusion makes the album feel truly whole, as if the listener is finally released back into silence. It really should have been part of the general release to truly close out the album.

Emotional Gravity Without Extremity

One of Melting Sun’s most radical choices is what it refuses to do. There is no shock value, no cathartic collapse into chaos. Instead, the album sustains emotional tension through:

• Gradual harmonic shifts

• Repetition that soothes rather than disorients

• Lyrics that suggest reflection rather than despair

This restraint gives the album longevity. It’s not an album you survive—it’s one you return to.

Reception and Legacy

At release, Melting Sun polarized longtime fans who expected black-metal roots to remain intact. But in hindsight, it stands as Lantlôs’ most confident statement: a refusal to be bound by scene expectations.

Today, the album is often cited as:

• A benchmark post-metal/shoegaze crossover

• Proof that heaviness can be emotional

• A successful genre exit rather than a compromise

  
  

Final Thoughts: Transformation Without Apology

Melting Sun isn’t about evolution for evolution’s sake. It’s about honesty—following an artistic instinct even when it leads away from what first earned recognition.

Lantlôs didn’t abandon heaviness; they redefined it. In doing so, they created an album that feels timeless, quietly powerful, and deeply human.

If earlier Lantlôs was about isolation, Melting Sun—especially when completed by Melting Sun VII—is about emergence: stepping into warmth after years of self-imposed shadow.

And sometimes, that’s the heaviest move a band can make.