When My Dying Bride’s violin player shows up on your record, the doom world takes notice. When he shows up twice, and Shape of Despair’s vocalist joins him, you have either bought very expensive guest spots or you have written something that convinced them. One listen to Homesick settles which one this is.
Shores Of Null is a melodic death-doom band from Rome, formed in 2013 around vocalist Davide Straccione, with Gabriele Giaccari and Raffaele Colace on guitars, Matteo Capozucca on bass and Emiliano Cantiano on drums. Homesick, out since 16 October 2026 and their first release on Dusktone, is ten tracks about home as both comfort and wound: nostalgia, absence, and the places that made you and marked you. Shaun MacGowan of My Dying Bride plays violin on “Dreaming of a Scar” and “The Numbing Void”, and Natalie Koskinen of Shape of Despair sings on The Numbing Void. Those are not random names. They are the two coordinates this band navigates between: British gothic doom grief and Finnish funeral weight, filtered through a Roman melodic instinct that keeps everything singable.
They have form for ambition, too. The 2020 album Beyond the Shores (On Death and Dying) was written as one continuous piece of music, the kind of commitment most bands never risk. Homesick is the opposite move: ten distinct songs, two singles ahead of it (Bleed to Life above, Son of the Tide after), each built around what Straccione calls the tide, the forces that push and pull us through life until you learn to move with them instead of fighting.
Italy keeps doing this to us. The country files under power metal and Nanowar jokes in most people’s heads, but its underground keeps producing serious heaviness that nobody north of the Alps talks about. That is the same blind spot we keep writing about, whether it points at Paradise Lost’s draconian blueprint that bands like this grew up on, or at Draconian’s own slow-burning grief from the Swedish end of the same lineage. Shores Of Null belong in that conversation, and Homesick is the record to start with: fresh, European, and exactly one day old as I write this.
Play Bleed to Life above. If the chorus lands, the whole album is on Bandcamp, and the band sees that money.
Listen to this (straight from the band): Homesick on Bandcamp
