On Shape Of Ash, Norwegian band Leonov deepen their signature fusion of post-metal weight and cinematic atmosphere, crafting a record that feels both apocalyptic and reverent. Across its four sprawling tracks, the EP navigates themes of loss, ruin, and resilience with a painter’s sense of contrast—balancing towering riffs against ambient textures, and anguish against quiet grace. Tåran Reindal’s vocals remain the band’s emotional center, shifting seamlessly from ethereal murmurs to full-bodied laments that echo like prayers in a collapsing cathedral. The production is cavernous, allowing every drone, crash, and whisper to linger like smoke. Where their earlier work hinted at the sacred amid destruction, Shape Of Ash fully embraces that duality, offering a slow, smouldering meditation on what it means to endure when all else has burned away.
Samaritan, the opening track, sets the tone with a brooding, deliberate pace that feels less like a beginning and more like an emergence from wreckage. The song opens in near silence—distant drones and murmuring ambience evoking a ritualistic stillness—before the guitars swell into focus, distorted yet restrained, like a storm gathering at the edge of hearing. The vocals enter with a hushed intensity, almost chant-like at first, before gradually climbing in both volume and urgency. Her delivery is mesmerizing: neither pleading nor accusatory, but somewhere in between, like someone bearing witness to something too vast to name. As the track unfolds, the band leans into their dynamic mastery. The rhythm section pulses like a slow heartbeat, anchoring the soaring guitar layers that build toward a massive, cathartic crescendo in the final minutes. But Leonov doesn’t deliver release easily—they stretch the tension, letting the heaviness sink in before allowing even a hint of resolution. Samaritan feels like a procession: mournful, reverent, and unwavering in its emotional gravity. It’s not just an introduction to the record—it’s a threshold you cross, stepping into Leonov’s carefully scorched world.
Auld Ashok follows the solemn gravity of Samaritan with a colder, more spectral energy—less a continuation than a shift sideways into something stranger and more elusive. Where the opener builds like a lament, this track feels more like a haunting, as echoing guitar lines drift in with a glacial patience, bending and receding like distant sirens in fog. There’s a spaciousness here that’s almost disorienting, as if the song exists outside of linear time, suspended between memory and myth. Tåran Reindal’s vocals are especially ghostly on this track, layered in soft harmonies that hover just above the surface, at times more felt than heard. Lyrically abstract, she delivers her lines like fragments of forgotten incantations, underscoring the song’s dreamlike detachment. The band’s restraint is key—rather than erupting into full-blown heaviness, they maintain a tight control, letting distorted undercurrents and subtle rhythmic shifts create tension beneath the surface. When a heavier section does arrive, it’s less a climax than a slow collapse, like a structure giving way under unseen weight. Auld Ashok is one of the most texturally rich tracks on Shape Of Ash, trading post-metal’s usual crescendos for something more ambient, more intimate, and ultimately more unsettling. It lingers in the bones like a half-remembered dream, beautiful and a little unmoored.
The title track closes the EP with a finality that feels earned, not forced—a slow, weighty reckoning that gathers everything that’s come before and lets it smoulder. It begins in quiet mourning: clean guitar lines drifting over a bed of low, droning ambience, as if surveying the ruins left behind by the preceding tracks. Tåran Reindal’s voice returns like a benediction, fragile yet unflinching, delivering one of her most vulnerable performances on the record. There’s a spaciousness to the arrangement, as if the song is taking deep, measured breaths before the final plunge. When the heaviness arrives, it unfolds rather than explodes. The guitars surge forward, not in rage but in resignation, with chords that ring out like tolling bells. The rhythm section moves with a funereal pace, emphasizing each beat like footsteps through ash. Rather than building to a single cathartic peak, the song ebbs and flows, riding waves of distortion and retreating ambience in a final meditation on impermanence. Shape Of Ash doesn’t offer closure in the traditional sense; it leaves the listener in a space of reflection rather than resolution. But in doing so, it feels utterly true to Leonov’s vision: beauty scorched by grief, still standing. A final breath held just a moment longer before fading into silence.
With Shape Of Ash, Leonov have crafted an EP that feels both elemental and otherworldly—an exploration of sorrow, survival, and spiritual weight rendered in sound. Each track stands as its own slow-burning ritual, yet together they form a cohesive passage through shadow and fire, ending not in resolution but in reverent stillness. The band’s ability to balance crushing heaviness with spacious, melodic grace is more refined than ever, and Reindal’s voice remains a guiding force throughout: human, haunted, and quietly defiant. This isn’t music that demands attention—it invites surrender. And if you let it, Shape Of Ash will leave a mark, soft as dust and just as enduring.
For fans of: Cult Of Luna, SoftSun, BlackHeart
‘Shape Of Ash’ by Leonov is released on 4th July on Pelagic Records.
Words by Ell Bradbury
