Amorphis – Borderland Review

You do something for thirty-plus years, and you get pretty good at it.

Case in point: Finland’s thirty-five-year-old progressive metal wizards Amorphis. After starting out in a more death metal direction, over the last few decades, they’ve settled into a comfortable place at the junction point of prog and goth and folk and doom metals and grandiose rock, built upon folksy melodies, crunchy riffs, gigantic epic choruses, and a generally somber yet stately atmosphere.

The question, of course, for anyone reviewing a new Amorphis album in 2025 is more likely not to be “what is this, then?” and more likely “how does this one compare to the previous ones”? And that’s where that thirty-plus years of experience come in, because this far into their career, it seems that Amorphis is incapable of making a truly bad album. (The closest they’ve come is 2003’s rock-leaning Far From The Sun, and even that is more actively bland than actually bad.) And the short form answer is this: Like Halo before it, Borderland is a good Amorphis record, in the standard Amorphis mold, and like Halo before it, it’s not quite as good an Amorphis record as Queen Of Time or Under The Red Cloud before that.

“The Circle” is a strong opener, all chiming guitar echoes and Tomi’s powerful baritone croon, but it’s in the second and third tracks that Borderland hits its stride. The first (the second) is “Bones,” which is the album’s highlight, a stomping midtempo built on a huge doomy riff and those folk melodies, heavy verses augmented by a suitably sweeping chorus lifted to the heavens atop a majestic keyboard line. It’s as epic as Borderland gets, and handily the finest track on hand. And the second of the ones mentioned above (which is the third of them all) is “Dancing Shadow,” one of the album’s advance tracks and among its most “typically” Amorphis, with an arena-sized chorus that somehow welds its instantaneous melodic hook to lyrics like “the weasel slips into the stump” and “swims the seal and the walrus black / into the watery abyss.”

From there, though, Borderland settles back into the comfort of Amorphis’ established norm – “Fog To Fog” is a fine song, if a bit by-the-book for the band that birthed it. Same with “The Strange.” “Tempest” is a more balladic take, and it’s also … fine. And that’s the course of the rest of the record, with a brief uptick in another advance track, “Light And Shadows,” which is, if not adventurous, simply more exciting than those around it. None of the rest of Borderland is particularly… weak, but all of it is Amorphis-by-numbers. If you’re already sold on the band’s style, then yes, you will definitely enjoy this, because you should – it’s what Amorphis does, except that it’s like some distilled-down ideal of it, minus any particular inflections or edges or anything that separates it from the midline.

Still, all that adds up to this: Amorphis has been doing this a long time, and there’s no one better at sounding like Amorphis than Amorphis, and it’s very key that Amorphis sounds great and releases good records on the regular. It’s not Red Cloud; it’s not Queen Of Time. It’s more Halo than either of those, but regardless, Borderland is a good record. I don’t know that it’s a great record – maybe it’s a grower, but initial reactions are that it’s just a holding pattern – but even a good record from a band that is still capable of greatness is worthy.

After thirty years, Amorphis has gotten so good at this that they simply can’t stumble, even when they might not shine.