Review: Phantom Spell – Heather & Hearth

Style: progressive rock, hard rock, NWOTHM (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Hällas, Rush
Country: Spain
Release date: 18 July 2025

The past is a foreign country, but music (like all art) can take us on a brief holiday there to explore the unfamiliar context of a piece’s predecessors. Phantom Spell’s Heather & Hearth puts its predecessors front and center, joining the musical aesthetics of obvious 80s influences like Iron Maiden and Rainbow with modern sensibilities of the online streaming era and the advancements of a more mature prog scene. It’s a funny sort of throwback, also reminiscent of the contemporary Hällas, a deliberate anachronism inducing nostalgia for a hypothetical past rather than for anything that ever actually happened. Although 80s hard rock remains the most prominent influence, Heather & Hearth also steps up the progressive tendencies glimpsed through Phantom Spell’s debut Immortal’s Requiem. Where Requiem mostly dumped its complexities into its climactic closing track, the latest solo work from singer and guitarist Kyle McNeill (also frontman of the equally retro-inspired Seven Sisters) spreads out the love a bit more, both opening and closing with adventurous eleven-minute monsters.

Phantom Spell’s comforting ideal of a simpler past goes beyond the instrumental aesthetics of early heavy metal, forming the main thrust of the album’s lyrical themes as well. Images of human history and the eternal cycles of nature combine with invocations of elders’ wisdom and travellers’ tales of other lands, ruminating on the constant churn of lived experience that comprises human existence. Stanzas like this from the title track paint beautiful scenes filled with this existential longing for inaccessible things lost to time or distance: “The roots creak and groan / As they speak tongues of old / Words from the wise / Passing us by / From the grove.” The yearning continues in an a cappella segment before the album fades out on a collage of bird calls: “When someday I pass beyond / Gift my bones back to the ground / Lay me down / Fare me well / And let my memories turn the soil.” The digital version from Bandcamp also includes a touching acoustic rendition of the folk song “Old Pendle” as a bonus track, revelling further in the elegance of antiquity with the song’s gentle reminiscence.

If you allow yourself to fall under the spell and be drawn into this alluring fantasy world, you’ll find a lot of musical talent supporting the bright, pastoral facade. McNeill’s performance has a captivating air with a confident and comforting vocal style that settles the listener into a cozy seat as they absorb the precise and pleasant warblings he coaxes from his guitar. The soundscapes feel fitting for quaint countryside scenes, reflecting the lyrics’ descriptions of the passing of seasons. The title track in particular feels like a late afternoon walk along a country lane, setting the scene with meandering melodies and even a rare keyboard solo before finally fading out with the gentle orange glow of a sunset. As another highlight, “A Distant Shore” shows off Phantom Spell’s excellent songwriting in a convenient, compact form. Although it’s far from the longest track, it shows some of the greatest development and contrast between its soft, slow beginning and the more energetic and rhythmically complex third quarter. The sharp transition at the midpoint also shows a lot of compositional talent, moving quickly between two markedly different moods without feeling at all rushed or disjointed.

McNeill takes his comfortable center-stage role as singer and guitarist, but there’s not much other competition for the spotlight. Keyboard accents provide additional backing rhythms and transition fills while also intensifying the 80s throwback vibes, but the keyboard parts rarely take on the main role. This feels like a limitation inherited in part from the project’s retro inspirations, carrying on the legacy of treating singers and guitarists as the face and heart of a rock or metal band by default. The unwavering focus placed on the vocal and guitar parts calls attention to Heather & Hearth’s small scope, revealing it as a relatively shallow experience with little to offer outside the main attraction. Perhaps this is the curse of the solo artist—after all, what can one man really do but string together phrase after phrase of himself singing and playing guitar? Each expertly crafted verse, chorus, or bridge blends uniformly with all the others, a blur of timeless, beautiful countryside scenery that creates this sense of being lost down a winding rural lane. I’m almost convinced that you could chop the entirety of Heather & Hearth into two-minute segments and rearrange them at random, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the recut version apart from the real recording despite how many times I’ve listened to it in full. While I enjoy virtually every one of those segments on its own, the indistinctness in the final composition holds the album back.

Heather & Hearth focuses on doing one thing and doing it well. The retro musical aesthetics of the early 80s are on full display, buoyed by the talents of a passionate creator and performer and enhanced with modern touches that were never available to artists of the time. However, the overriding theme of comforting nostalgia smacks of escapism, like the album was composed with a deliberate blindness to contemporary influences that might distract from the allure of the past. There’s nothing wrong with a little escapism here and there, but this intense yearning for times gone by tastes a little disappointing for a genre meant to be pushing the boundaries of convention. Heather & Hearth prioritizes the past in the extreme, picking only a few choice morsels to include out of all the artistic advancement of four and a half decades, in contrast to Hällas’s homage-laden style which combines and recontextualizes the aesthetics of the past and present through flashy retrofuturism. Like musical cotton candy, the end result sounds pretty and is fun to consume, but doesn’t make for a proper meal by itself.

Recommended tracks: The Autumn Citadel, A Distant Shore, Heather & Hearth
You may also like: Seven Sisters, Divine Intervention, Wytch Hazel, The Riven
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Wizard Tower Records

Phantom Spell is:
– Kyle McNeill (everything)