PARADISE LOST guitarist Gregor Mackintosh has revealed the three albums he would bring to a desert island, naming a trio of doom metal touchstones in a new interview with Czech outlet Metal & Rock Zone.
His first pick was immediate: CANDLEMASS's 1986 debut, "Epicus Doomicus Metallicus." "There's no 100% album for me, but that's... there's no real filler on it to me. Every bit has something," Mackintosh said, crediting the record's guitar tone as a formative influence. He singled out the solo on "Crystal Ball" in particular, saying he spent years trying to chase down its sound before realizing "it was in the guy's fingers" rather than something reproducible through gear alone.
For his second choice, Mackintosh reached back to his teenage years, picking TROUBLE's 1990 album "Psalm 9." "I like lots of different kinds of music now, but if you're talking about the 18-year-old me, when you get into music, it burns into you," he explained.
His third pick came with a personal story attached: CARNIVORE's "Retaliation," which he and PARADISE LOST vocalist Nick Holmes used to blast while getting ready for nights out during the band's earliest days, when the two shared a house. "Our Saturday-night going-out music, to get ready, to get the hair big and all the rest of it, was CARNIVORE 'Retaliation,'" Mackintosh recalled, describing the pair heading out afterward in full leather to wait for the bus into town.
The interview arrives as PARADISE LOST continues touring behind "Ascension," its 17th studio album, released last September via Nuclear Blast Records and the band's first LP in five years following 2020's "Obsidian." This past February, Mackintosh revealed he had been dealing with unspecified health issues that led to significant weight loss.
Formed in Halifax, England in 1988, PARADISE LOST helped pioneer gothic metal with early albums like 1991's "Gothic," and have gone on to sell more than two million records over a career now spanning nearly four decades, exploring doom, death and gothic textures along the way while remaining, by most accounts, metal's reigning kings of melancholy.