"Gothic metal should not simply sound dark. It should confront mortality, longing, transcendence, and conflict. Otherwise, it becomes decoration and Eurovision," says Fernando Ribeiro, longtime frontman of Portugal's goth-metal titans Moonspell, who have just released their haunting fourteenth studio album, Far From God.
On Far From God, Moonspell have never sounded more creatively re-energized, a monumental feat considering the band is swiftly approaching their fortieth anniversary. Evoking an eclectic sound that fuses influences ranging from Type O Negative to The Sisters of Mercy, albeit with a fresh coat of paint courtesy of producer Jaime Gomez Arellano (Ghost, Behemoth, Opeth), Far From God directly addresses the ups and downs, the triumphs and the tragedies of a road-worn life. To further bring their lyrical offerings to life, Moonspell, once again, incorporates distinct and culturally accurate portrayals of vampire-related themes and imagery that will put to shame any mass-produced Hollywood bastardizations.
With Far From God out now via Napalm Records, we sat down with Moonspell frontman Fernando Ribeiro to unpack the themes and influences behind the band's fourteenth studio album, gothic metal and fashion, vampires, the concept of mortality, and so much more.
Having just released your fourteenth studio album, Far From God, it feels like this record came from a very deep sense of reflection on the past while also keeping your eyes set on the future. With this album being nearly five years in the making, why was it so important to capture the essence of what fans first fell in love with on your 1996 sophomore album Irreligious? At the same time, how did you balance tapping back into that earlier energy while still continuing to evolve in a way that does not feel like regression?
Fernando Ribeiro: I never wanted to recreate Irreligious. That would be impossible and, frankly, unnecessary. Albums belong to their time. What interested me was understanding why that album still resonates with people nearly thirty years later. I think the answer lies beyond the songs themselves. Irreligious came from a place of simplicity and drive for the homogeneous, a solid body of work and a simple equation with both metal and goth in the same dosage.
With Far From God, I felt a similar urgency. Not musically, necessarily, but spiritually. Music often feels trapped between algorithms and nostalgia. We wanted to create something that stood apart from that cycle of two years on the road, new album, and so forth. [Friedrich] Nietzsche wrote that “the desert grows.” I often think about that line. Not as a prophecy of doom, but as a warning about spiritual emptiness. Far From God was born from that feeling, the need to create something meaningful in a culture increasingly deviated from a righteous path.
If there is a connection with Irreligious, it is not nostalgia. It is the desire to make it simple, primordial, and original.
Fourteen albums is no small feat, and the band has now been active for the better part of thirty-six years. When you first started the band in Portugal, did you ever imagine the journey would last this long? What is it that continues to keep the fire burning so strongly within you to create and to now arguably be putting out some of the best material the band has released in decades?
Fernando Ribeiro: Absolutely not. When you’re eighteen or twenty years old, you’re not thinking about anniversaries. You’re thinking about the next rehearsal. We were living very much in the present. Longevity is not something you plan. It is something you luckily fulfill.
What keeps me motivated is curiosity. Curiosity is useful. Doubt is useful. Even dissatisfaction is useful. Every valley is comfort, every peak is deceit. Creativity comes from tension. Not misery, necessarily, but tension and pain. No love without pain. No goth without a broken heart. I still feel there are many things left to discover, but even more to hold to.
Far From God, both through its themes and the title track itself, obviously reincorporates the vampiric elements and gothic metal styles that many people have come to love and expect from Moonspell, but this time with a much more refreshed approach. You have been very vocal about feeling like both the vampire genre and gothic metal as a whole have become somewhat watered down or stale in recent years. What did you find yourself pulling from in terms of influences, both musically and from things such as novels, films, and other art forms, that helped re-contextualize your love for creating true vampiric gothic metal?
Fernando Ribeiro: The vampire remains one of the most fascinating figures in modern mythology because it is profoundly human, like all monsters. Just a guy minding the business of his kingdom and household until something terrible happens to him first and he’s robbed of love. The vampire is simultaneously predator and victim, saint and sinner, immortal and profoundly lonely. It contains those human contradictions, and Gothic art has always thrived on nuance.
What disappoints me sometimes is that contemporary culture often reduces the vampire to aesthetics. Fangs, capes, blood, and fashion. But what interests me is the tragedy. Dracula understood it. So did Nosferatu. So did Nosferatu the Vampyre. More recently, I think Robert Eggers brought some of that existential horror back into focus. The vampire is not tragic because he cannot die. He is tragic because he cannot fully belong to life anymore.
Musically, we revisited many of the things that first inspired us: The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, Type O Negative, Paradise Lost, but also Romantic poetry, Symbolist literature, Fernando Pessoa, Charles Baudelaire, and even some of the Catholic imagery that remains deeply embedded in Southern European culture.
Gothic metal should not simply sound dark. It should confront mortality, longing, transcendence, and conflict. Otherwise, it becomes decoration and Eurovision.
On the new album you once again enlisted producer Jaime Gomez Arellano, who also produced your previous album Hermitage. What do you feel Jaime brings out of the band in a studio setting, and what was the overall recording process like this time around?
Fernando Ribeiro: Jaime understands atmosphere in a way that very few producers do. A lot of producers know how to make records sound heavy. Jaime understands how to make records feel haunted. That’s an important distinction. He understands that darkness is not simply a matter of distortion or volume. Darkness is emotional. It exists in the spaces between notes, in restraint, in tension.
The recording process was surprisingly focused because by the time we entered the studio, we knew exactly what kind of album we wanted to make. There was very little second-guessing. The uncertainty happened before the writing phase. Once we found our direction, everything moved naturally. Jaime helped us remain faithful to that vision.
I would love to touch on the track, “Cross Your Heart,” which chronicles the tragedy of lives lost on the road all over the world. I thought it was really intriguing that you reflected on your own experiences traveling with the band while writing the song. Having spent the better part of thirty years touring in vehicles and constantly facing the reality that your life could be lost at any moment due to unforeseen dangers on the road, do you find that mortality is something you reflect on more as you grow older and continue this journey? On the other hand, do you also feel a sense of peace knowing that while you have sacrificed so much as touring musicians, you have also been able to see so much of the world and experience things many people could only dream of?
Fernando Ribeiro: One thing touring teaches you is that mortality is frighteningly ordinary. You drive thousands of miles, pass roadside memorials, flowers, crosses, and photographs, and you are constantly reminded that life can change in a second. Not through some grand existential event, but through a moment of distraction, exhaustion, or bad luck. As I grow older, I think more about death itself. I think more about our fragility. The ancient Stoics used to speak about memento mori, remembering death not as an obsession but as a way of appreciating life more deeply. I think touring teaches a similar lesson.
At the same time, I feel immense gratitude. Music allowed me to see the world, meet extraordinary people, and experience cultures that a young man from Portugal could never have imagined. There were sacrifices, certainly. Family moments missed, relationships strained, countless hours spent away from home. But there is also a tremendous privilege in being allowed to dedicate your life to art, and this viciously trumps over longing.
“Cross Your Heart” lives somewhere between mourning and hope that we get it together somehow.
Switching gears, as a media outlet associated with a fashion brand, we always like to ask artists about aesthetics and self-expression. How do you personally like to express yourself through fashion and visual presentation, especially on stage and within the band’s music videos and photo shoots, particularly with the more gothic elements of Moonspell’s identity?
Fernando Ribeiro: I’ve always believed style should reveal something about a person rather than conceal them. Taste is what matters most, hands down. Gothic culture has given me many things over the years, but perhaps its greatest gift is permission to embrace beauty and elegance without fear, more than metal.
On stage, I like clothing to become part of the narrative. It should contribute to the atmosphere without becoming a costume. The danger with Gothic aesthetics is falling into caricature. The challenge is finding authenticity within symbolism. I admire figures like Peter Murphy, Andrew Eldritch, and Nick Cave because they never looked like they were dressing up. Their style felt like a natural extension of who they were. That remains the goal. Especially for a fifty-one-year-old man, style is everything.
For a fun question, if Moonspell’s music could score any film, either classic or modern, what would it be and why?
Fernando Ribeiro: Probably Nosferatu, Faust, or some road movie with that aesthetic flair. After Hours too, or They Live.
We do music like we’d do theatre or film. The lyrics are the script, the instruments the cameras, the producer is the director. The frame and the word are mightier than the guitar or the kick drums.
Unfortunately, it’s like Waiting for Godot, and that invite will never arrive, or we’ll have to provide for ourselves. I would love to do Moonspell’s Dracula in theatre, for example.
You obviously just released your new album which comes alongside a busy run of European festival dates this summer. What are you looking forward to the most about this next chapter for the band, and is there anything else you would like to shout out?
Fernando Ribeiro: More than anything, I look forward to discovering what these songs become once they leave our hands. We already played some of them at a German gothic festival, and it was beautiful, really. Albums are strange things. You spend years creating them in isolation and then suddenly they belong to the world. They acquire meanings you never intended. They become attached to people’s memories, relationships, and experiences. And that’s magic, unexplainable maybe. And it fascinates me.
I would simply like to thank everyone who continues to support music in a meaningful way. Buy records. Read books. Go to concerts. Support independent media. Stay curious. We hope Far From God contributes something worthwhile to that conversation.
FAR FROM GOD by Moonspell is available to stream/purchase now here.
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