Review: Falling Leaves – The Silence That Binds Us

Style: Melodic death metal, doom metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Insomnium, Green Carnation, Novembers Doom, Saturnus
Country: United Arab Emirates
Release date: 5 September 2025

Ah, autumn. The kids are back in school, there’s a crisp bite to the morning air, and the leaves are beginning to change colour and fall. It’s a season that invites a little melancholic reflection; a chance to blow the metaphorical dust off those sadboi staples in your music library and let the gloom wash over you.

It’s ironic, then, that melodic doom metal band Falling Leaves hail not from some mist-capped Scandinavian forest, but rather from the United Arab Emirates, a country with little deciduous vegetation to speak of. Yet, despite their geographic disconnect from the season that their name evokes, the band’s sound is rich in autumnal aesthetic, with a saturnine, sombre death-doom atmosphere that showcase influences from bands like Novembers Doom, Insomnium, and Saturnus. Thirteen years after releasing their debut album Mournful Cry of a Dying Sun,Falling Leaves return with The Silence That Binds Us, a sophomore effort whose thematic flickers of hope and resilience go to battle against a solemn march towards inevitable doom and decay.

But before we get too poetic, let me ask you a question that will be fundamental to understanding my critical examination of The Silence That Binds Us. Are you familiar with the game Kiss, Marry, Kill?¹ Falling Leaves’ vocals are separated into clean singing, growls, and spoken word. To better elaborate my analysis of the album, I thought it would be helpful to assign a fate to each of these according to the rules of the game. Let’s start with the clean vocals: they’re an easy Kiss. They’re here for a good time, not a long time: comparatively sparse across the album’s fifty-one minutes, the cleans leave you wanting more, like a fleeting beam of sunlight through those brilliant autumn branches. They’re sometimes layered for a sort of anthemic, chant-like effect, and even brush close to Green Carnation’s bittersweet grandeur when given a chance to unfurl to their full potential, as in “The Everlasting Wounds”. 

Meanwhile, the growls are definite Marriage material. Paul Kuhr (Novembers Doom) lends his roiling harsh vocals as a guest contributor, but elsewhere, vocalist Bashar Haroun holds his own with deep, weathered growls that feel lived-in, less truculent than resigned and woeful, the weary sigh of a long but steadfast companionship with despair.²

Of course, that means we’re Killing the spoken word passages, and make no mistake: they really deserve to die. I acknowledge that when executed with just the right amount of gravitas and restraint (like in Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West), a little narration can be absolute dynamite. However, we’re not talking about a little here: of the eight tracks on The Silence That Binds Us, every single one features spoken word, and the delivery is not sufficiently dynamic to justify its ubiquity or cover for the sometimes campy lyrics. “My voice dissolves into nothing,” the narrator tells us in “Ashes of My Mind”, and I find myself wishing that it would, just to give us a break from the voiceover. Indeed, when he goes on to describe “a spirit crushed, where hope has died” in “Shattered Hopes”, I wonder if he is actually talking about me and my hope to give this album a high score.

That imbalance, and the tendency to to tell us rather than show us what to feel, sums up The Silence That Binds Us fairly well. The atmosphere is there, but the album’s emotional beats sometimes feel overexplained, more “melancholy by the numbers” than genuinely evocative. Still, the musicianship itself deserves praise. The dual guitars of Fadi Stanboulieh and Ala’a Swalha weave graceful, dolorous lines that toil steadily toward oblivion. Their riffs move with purpose and momentum, even though mainly limited to more dirge-like tempo, and occasional incorporation of Middle Eastern modes add a colourful allure that the band would do well to embrace further. The synths and keyboards, when they avoid the sort of plunking, earnest cheesiness that prevails on opening track “Carvings”, have some great moments. They shimmer in the introduction to “The Angel On My Shoulder”, and sweep grandly across “Re-Silence (Part III)”. And everything sounds great: mastered by the prolific Dan, “The Man,” Swanö, every facet of Falling Leaves’ sound has space to unfold with crisp, full-bodied resonance. 

The Silence That Binds Us is a sincere and well-performed effort, rich in atmosphere and reverent of its influences, but in need of compositional refinement. Falling Leaves’ melodic instincts and ambiance ring true; it’s the excessive narration and lack of contrast and dynamism that stifle their ability to deliver a more compelling and immersive album. Falling Leaves clearly know how to summon autumn’s melancholy chill—if they stop narrating every leaf as it falls and take a few more chances along the way, a spot in the canon alongside elegiac melodic death-doom contemporaries may be within reach.

Recommended tracks: Ashes of My Mind, The Everlasting Wounds, Re-Silence (Part III)
You may also like: Altars of Grief, Shape of Despair, In Mourning, Eternal Storm, October Tide
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Metal-Archives

Label: Independent

Falling Leaves is:
– Ala’a Swalha (Guitars)
– Ali M. (Bass)
– Fadi Stanboulieh (Guitars)
– Bashar Haroun (vocals)
With guests:
– Paul Kuhr (vocals)
– Fabio Alessandrini (drums)
– Ariel Perchuk (keyboards)

1. It’s more commonly known by a name unfit for polite company, but I do like to keep up appearances. ↩︎
2. I’m pro-marriage, of course—why do you ask? ↩︎