Junius are important enough to have a Wikipedia page, and that tells you the high regard people have for this Bostonian duo. Now on album number four, they seem determined to avoid any categorisation, yet they have a coherence and aesthetic consistency that most bands would envy. Sotera will entice you with one listen and leave you wondering if you’re listening to a new form of gothic metal.
A swirling choral harmony introduces ‘Disciple’ and settles into the opening verses before you can guess what might happen next. It’s a clever move that hooks you in with its melodramatic baritone voice and grungy guitar lines. Listen how drummer, Dana Filloon, use his fills as a signal for Joseph E. Martinez to switch to his belting voice for the chorus. The thrill increases when they bring things to a sudden halt at the three-minute mark with stubborn palm-muting and the return of the choral keyboards.
If you come into this record looking for Neurosis and Cult of Luna, you’ll be disappointed. But you’ll be delighted if you want Joy Division injected with the fuzz and froth of metal. Martinez expresses himself at the microphone for ‘The Oracle’ like a cross between David Bowie and Andrew Eldritch (Sisters of Mercy). Most of this appears to be in a verse-chorus format, but the radical dynamic resets and imaginative guitar shifts (often from floating chords to aggressive triplets) leave you unsure whether to assume the prayer stance or thrash your head around.
There’s a divine magnificence to this music that chills the bones, yet the fragility at the heart of it is a reminder of its humanity. One can see why this group receive the “atmospheric metal” tag after one spin of ‘Summon Her’. The drums play the beats in a relaxed manner and add to the floating sensation, and it makes the muscular guitars even more powerful when they intrude upon this solitude. Add in the liturgical keyboards, and you have a force that exists outside the band. Indeed, the real triumph here is how Junius maintain a vicious metallic pulse underneath their grandiose posturing. Martinez deserves the plaudits for the way he pushes his baritone head voice to the highest part of his register like the shoots of a bean plant breaking through the earth.
And yet these Bostonians show they can express their changing mood with a contemplative grind of the plectrum against the bass strings. Observe how the the latter lays the foundations for ‘Darkwater’ to evolve from an uneasy relationship between bass and voice to a terrific thump of aggressive death-doom formations. Sometimes, the malevolence overwhelms the melancholia. The bloodthirsty vocal assault of ‘Serpent’ is the most surprising cut here despite its standard gothic metal structure. (Parts of the opening verse appear to be in the German language.) By contrast, ‘Lucifera’ is a reminder that this band could share a Spotify algorithm linked to Leonard Cohen and Lycia. It’s the one time you can see the honeysuckles in the shrubbery before the rain arrives and washes away the last vestiges of summer.
“Sailing towards the unseen / I feel the pulse of time / I’m bored with life / So I wash upon your shores to die,” declares Martinez in closing effort, ‘Scythian’. The easy comparison here is Type O Negative, but they prop up the dying flame with the choral arrangements that opened the album. Junius have a murderous aggression in their music that threatens to spill through into their funereal settings like cracks of light in a sepulchre. The transcendent black metal ending is unexpected and unapologetic in its epic reach. Sotera is a record that never fails to astonish for all the right reasons.
Kirk Houghton
Verdict
Release Date: 26/06/2026
Record Label: Prosthetic Records / MNRK Records
Standout tracks: The Oracle; Darkwater; Scythian
Suggested Further Listening: Paradise Lost – The Plague Within (2015), Pallbearer – Forgotten Days (2020), Novembers Doom – Major Arcana (2025)