When making music built around a specific sound, idea or contrast, there's always the complicated question of just how much of that specific thing you should give your audience. For example, if a track is built around a very satisfying or captivating hook, should you repeat this hook as often as possible, and risk degrading its presence? Or should you use it only once or twice and risk depriving your audience of what they want to hear the most? The balance is very hard to strike. It's possible that striking it is one of the defining characteristics of bands that move from being merely "very good" to being "great". Put otherwise, few musicians are able to resist the allure of self indulgence which comes with knowing you have something very good in your hands.
On Circadian Promise, Fires In the Distance are faced with these problems. Their second release, Air Not Meant For Us, was not only fantastic, it was also popular and widely celebrated. While the band definitely have more than "just" the basic formula which makes their music tick, it's also true that much of its draw is in the contrast of its grandiose and echoing doom metal and its redolent synths. So, what do you do? Do you make your third album resplendent with those synths and bring ever increasing peaks around them? Or do you draw back and do something different, trying to arrive at the same point, the same feeling, of the previous release from a new direction? On Circadian Promise, Fires In the Distance have firmly selected the former.
This means that if you're listening to the album for that sound, that mix of deep, rich, and emotive synths and doom metal, you might be disappointed. From the get go, the synths are more quiet, both literally in the mix itself and also in the composition. While present, and important to the structure of the tracks, they are much more in the background of the track than on the previous album. This is not universally true; "To You, Author of My Fade" for example, the album's second track, would not have been out of place on Air Not Meant For Us. But even then, it would have been by far the least synth-heavy track of the album.
However, if you are listening to the band for something else, for the excitement of well executed doom, then you are still in the right place. In fact, I think Circadian Promise is Fires In the Distance's best album. First, the compositions are much better. Previous releases from the band saw them repeat a somewhat simplistic structure for the tracks. It was satisfying but not that interesting on relisten. On Circadian Promise, there's a lot more willingness to play around with how tracks are constructed. The aforementioned second track is a good example of this. Its nine minutes are spread across bridges, solos, and choruses which play around first with heavier structures, then more "open" grandiose parts. The track ends up running back and forth between these structures, mixing them together in interesting ways (listen for the outro; it's probably one of my favorite passages from the band).
The second, and major, point of improvement for this album is the use of clean vocals. Completely absent from the first and second release (if my memory doesn't betray me), these vocals are expertly used on Circadian Promise. Beyond their actual technical execution, which is excellent, they are also used well in the song structure which I called out above. The main vocal style is harsh and these cleans are used to accentuate the epic and grand peaks of each track. So instead of relying on a standard leading/backing structure, as so many doom metal bands do, Fires In the Distance deploy clean vocals on Circadian Promise as a thematic tool which uses the harsh vocals as a foil to set up the more emotive parts of the composition.
Bottom line, if you're looking to Circadian Promise for that one specific thing that first drew attention to Fires In the Distance, you'll find little of it. But if you're here for well constructed and excellent doom, then you're in luck. Fires In the Distance show real maturity on Circadian Promise, happy and able to dig deeper into what makes their sound tick and what fans are actually listening to their music for. The result is a different, but even better, release and one which should be a joy for anyone looking for big, sweeping, and dramatic metal in 2026.
Circadian Promise releases June 12th. You can pre-order it here.