The stunning fifth album from Sweden's Cult of Luna sees the band make the leap from esoteric post hardcore to progressively minded art rock with ease.

Featuring a harsher, heavier and more defined approach, 'Eternal Kingdom' revolves around an intricate and bizarre concept that seeps into every pore of the album, from the very title itself, via the lyrics, song titles and artwork. With the album linked in this way to a defined concept, the resulting output is the band's most coherent and devastating to date.

Based in the northern Swedish town of Umeå, Cult of Luna rehearse in an area that was once the site of a long demolished mental institution. Upon moving their practice space to a different spot on the same site, the band uncovered long forgotten relics of the hospital, including old apparatus and medical journals. Amongst the discovery was the diary of Holger Nilsson, a former inmate of the prison placed there after drowning his wife. The diary was titled 'Tales from the Eternal Kingdom'.

Digesting the diary, the band realized that they had stumbled upon the ramblings of a madman. In the diary, Nilsson blamed the death of his wife on UgÌn, a fictional character created to pass the blame for the murder. The diary created a completely imagined world in which owl men and tree men all contributed to a fantasy story that explained why Nilsson was innocent of the crime.

Naming after the album after the diary itself, and weaving their own intricate compositions of light and shade around the harrowing story, Cult of Luna have produced a dark masterpiece, shadowed in the macabre and the fantastical, the perfect companion to the bands own brand of cathartic melancholia.