Celesterre are probably the most enigmatic doom act from Holland, if only because they work in a style all their own and have spent their career trying to properly define it. Previous albums were interesting, but came off as more exercises in disjointed experimentation than anything cohesive. This brings us to their third full-length outing, Horror and Hope, which marks a powerful evolution into a unified sound that finally starts reaching for what they've been grasping at from the very start.

From the opening chord to the final fade-out, this album is an intense journey that balances crushing weight with glimmers of somber beauty, all occasionally threaded through the grim frost of black metal. The listener is plunged into crushing riffs and cavernous grooves from the start, with songs that are walls of slow-burn distortion, droning bass, and drums that thunder like distant storms, only to have their sluggish tempos interrupted by eruptions of blast beats, tremolo-picked leads, and harsh shrieks. What prevents all this from becoming monolithic is the sharp contrast found in frequent passages of eerie melodies, atmospheric synth washes, choral echoes, and the rare but effective clean vocal counterpoints, all coming together as sharp reminders that melody and melancholy can carry as much weight as sheer force. A greatly improved production from the muddy sound of previous albums also helps to give clarity and weight to the layered guitars and harsh vocals cut through each other without drowning anything out, further adding impact to an approach that needed it but didn't always have it.

Lyrically, this album is carefully constructed around the interplay of dread and solace, the horror of existence and personal abyss colliding with and finding relief in confronting our own shadows, isolation and cosmic despair fought with hope and loving remembrance. This is best portrayed in the album highlight "As the Giants Fall," whose slow entrance with narration accompanied by rhythmic guitars dramatically builds into a crescendo of screams and violence before gently, beautifully descending into an acoustic reflection that gives you space to breathe, a literal sigh of hope after the relentless assault of darkness.

If The Wild came across as Celesterre wrestling with what their identity would be and Earth a maturation of their doom-tinged anguish into something more refined and ambitious, Horror and Hope is the flowering of that journey that embraces the heaviness, atmosphere, and raw emotion of the past and starts to pull all the pieces together into something affecting and novel. The real beginning of a potentially iconoclastic band.