Shadow Flowers turn ‘Paraselene’ into a towering, dream-soaked arrival

Right from the start, ‘Paraselene’ feels enormous. As the first glimpse of Shadow Flowers’ debut album Blood Book, the Southampton project delivers a track that swells with distortion, atmosphere and emotion, wrapping shoegaze, grunge and alternative rock into something that feels both bruising and strangely beautiful.

Led by songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Aaron Mills alongside Ash Babb and Patrick White, Shadow Flowers have a real gift for making heaviness feel cinematic. The guitars surge, blur and shimmer, creating the sense of weather rolling in across an open landscape.

A paraselene is a false moon created by light refracting through ice crystals, and Mills uses that image as a metaphor for both grief and memory; the familiar returning in altered form, close enough to recognise but distorted enough to feel unsettling.

There are flashes of Smashing Pumpkins and Deftones in the density and dynamics, but ‘Paraselene’ never feels like a collection of references. Shadow Flowers push those influences into a much more vivid world of their own, where melody fights its way through layers of noise and beauty constantly threatens to collapse into chaos.

Recorded with Ian Davenport and mixed and mastered by Peter Fletcher, ‘Paraselene’ has enough clarity to reveal its detail while still preserving the danger inside the performance.

‘Paraselene’ is vast, hypnotic and beautifully unstable. It’s the kind of debut-album introduction that makes the world around the band feel instantly bigger.