Master Massive: Islands and Bells
Courtesy of United Forces PR
Single review · From the forthcoming album White Shadows (Fireflash Records, July 10, 2026)
There is a cold, resonant space in "Islands and Bells," the new single from Sweden's Master Massive. Anticipating the traditional, soaring grandeur of Maiden or Dio , listeners instead encounter a sound that is decidedly stranger and more patient. As the second offering from their upcoming album White Shadows , the track carries the heavy doom of Candlemass and the ritualistic chill of early Mercyful Fate. By trading typical studio polish for a windswept, folkloric imagery , Master Massive captures an atmospheric depth that is increasingly rare in 2026 , crafting a song that walks right along the edges of myth.
The bell that tolls
The title is pulled, gently, from John Donne. In his 1624 Meditation XVII — the same passage Hemingway later quarried for For Whom the Bell Tolls — Donne argued that no human stands alone, and that the bell rung for one death is also rung for the rest of us. Master Massive's lead guitarist and lyricist Jan Strandh has said in the press notes that his verses had sat in a drawer for fifteen years before a single dark riff, played one afternoon out of nowhere, finally gave them their home. That's a long time for words to wait for their music — and you can hear it. The lyrics have the worn-in quality of something that was already true before it became a song.
The imagery itself is geographic and elemental: islands and coastlines, a wolf and a lamb, candles lit on a windy tundra, frozen soil in deep maroon, hidden tracks on a barren moor. Donne's meditation was about human connectedness; Master Massive turn it outward into landscape. The bell isn't just funereal here. It's a signal across distance — a way of being heard through fog. Anyone who has stood somewhere lonely and listened to wind move across stone knows this register.
Three voices, one storm
The song's secret weapon is its vocal cast. Master Massive carry three lead vocalists — Tony Niva, Marcus "Masken" Karlsson, and Viktor Gustafsson — and on this track the dynamic shifts feel like weather changing. Strandh has described Gustafsson as the rare singer who can sound like a witch one moment and drop into pure beauty the next, and you can hear exactly what he means: there's a passage where the vocal steps out of the choir entirely and into something incantatory. Vibrato hangs in the air. Then it folds back into the clean, dynamic delivery you'd expect from the great 80s and 90s frontmen.
Underneath, Strandh openly courts the lineage. He's said he wanted a Tony Iommi riff in one place and a Candlemass riff in another — and rather than the pastiche that move usually produces, the riffs feel like guests passing through a hall that already has its own architecture. Max Warnby's bass moves with real warmth in the verses, holding the song's weight without pinning it down.
A record without a click
This is cool: White Shadows was tracked entirely without a click track. The band has said the goal was a natural groove — the kind of feel you hear in older recordings and in classical music — and that drummer Johan Hautajärvi was the right player for the challenge. You can hear what they're after. Tempo breathes very slightly across "Islands and Bells," the way a tide breathes against a shore. It isn't sloppy. It's human. Something most of us miss these days. There's a difference between rhythm locked to a grid and rhythm that drifts a hair on either side of it because the player is listening to the song instead of a metronome — and the latter is what gives older records their warm, slightly unsteady gravity. Master Massive are betting that an audience in 2026 still wants to feel that. On this song, they win the bet.
The film inside the song
The video, edited by Strandh himself, draws primarily from F.W. Murnau's Faust (1926), with snippets of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and Jean Epstein's Finis Terræ (1929) and Le Tempestaire (1947). It's a beautiful pairing. Murnau's Faust is all chiaroscuro — a film about pacts made in the cold spaces between candles — and the song's lyric world sits inside that visual grammar as if it had been waiting there all along. Epstein's storm footage gives the chorus its weather. The result is a music video that doesn't try to look modern. It looks recovered, like something that had been waiting a hundred years to be set to its proper score.
"Islands and Bells" is the kind of single that rewards the second listen more than the first. Its surface is heavy, stately, theatrical. Its bones are literary. Its bloodstream is patient. If the rest of White Shadows keeps this temperature, Instead of throwing out a record for this year's metal cycle, Master Massive intends for their music to age into a classic.
We will be waiting for July 10.
Master Massive — Tony Niva, Marcus "Masken" Karlsson, Viktor Gustafsson (lead vocals); Jan Strandh (lead guitar, vocals); Max Warnby (bass); Johan Hautajärvi (drums). White Shadows is out July 10, 2026 via Fireflash Records.
Preorder White Shadows at Bandcamp
