🪦🌅 Album Review: TODOMAL – Graveyards of Joy

Artist: TodoMal
Album: Graveyards of Joy
Label: Season of Mist
Genre: Atmospheric Doom Metal / Cinematic Doom / Dark Rock
Release: 3 July 2026
Tracks: 9
Running Time: Approx. 43 minutes

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸 5/5 Guitars

There are album titles that tell you precisely what sort of journey you’re about to take.

Graveyards of Joy is one of them.

Beauty and death.

Happiness and grief.

Hope growing somewhere it really shouldn’t.

Welcome to TodoMal.

The Anglo-Spanish outfit emerged from eastern Spain in 2020 and have spent their career developing a form of doom metal that feels considerably bigger than simply slow riffs + sadness.

And on their third album, they’ve created something bloody special.

Graveyards of Joy is the closing chapter of a trilogy that began with 2021’s Ultracrepidarian and continued with A Greater Good in 2023.

But this final instalment carries additional emotional weight.

Written following personal tragedy, these nine tracks wander through grief, anger, isolation and eventually something approaching hope.

And TodoMal have built an enormous landscape around those emotions.

Hammond organ.

Desolate folk.

Cinematic strings.

Crushing doom riffs.

Moments of near silence.

Melodies stretching towards the horizon.

At times it feels less like an album and more like somebody dropped a doom-metal band into a Sergio Leone film and told them to soundtrack the end of the world.

Right then.

Black clothes on.

Lights down.

Let’s wander through the graveyard. 🪦🖤

💿

Track Listing

1. Mare Ignis
2. Lucid Nightmare
3. Point of Coalescence
4. Misericordiah
5. Unholy
6. Deliverance
7. Humanised Gods
8. For Mercy
9. Graveyards of Joy

🪦

Track-by-Track Review

1. Mare Ignis

Graveyards of Joy doesn’t explode into existence.

It emerges.

Slowly.

The opening minutes immediately establish TodoMal’s enormous sense of space, allowing atmosphere to develop before the heavier elements begin tightening around you.

And when those guitars finally start carrying real weight?

Bloody hell.

There’s something deeply cinematic about Mare Ignis.

You can almost see an empty Spanish landscape stretching towards the horizon.

Nothing moving.

Nobody around.

Just heat, dust and riffs.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

2. Lucid Nightmare

The title perfectly describes the mood.

There’s something dreamlike about Lucid Nightmare, but underneath the beauty sits a constant sense of unease.

TodoMal understand that doom doesn’t need to bludgeon continuously.

Sometimes atmosphere does considerably more damage.

The melodic elements pull you forward while the darker textures make you increasingly suspicious about where exactly you’re being taken.

Spoiler:

Nowhere cheerful.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

3. Point of Coalescence

One of the album’s strongest moments.

Point of Coalescence demonstrates how naturally TodoMal blend traditional doom heaviness with cinematic rock.

The guitars are enormous.

But they’re surrounded by space.

That’s important.

Nothing feels overcrowded.

Every instrument gets room to breathe, making the moments where everything finally converges considerably more powerful.

It’s heavy without simply becoming loud.

Massive without becoming ridiculous.

Beautiful stuff.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

4. Misericordiah

At under three minutes, Misericordiah is one of the record’s shorter pieces.

And it’s perfectly placed.

After the widescreen scale of the opening tracks, TodoMal pull everything inward.

The atmosphere becomes intimate.

Almost fragile.

It’s less a traditional standalone doom-metal song and more an emotional bridge.

A moment to breathe.

Although considering where we are, perhaps don’t breathe too comfortably.

🎸🎸🎸🎸

5. Unholy

And the riffs return.

🔥

Unholy brings additional muscle into proceedings without abandoning the atmosphere that defines the record.

There’s a wonderfully dirty weight underneath the guitars.

The Hammond textures add depth rather than retro novelty, while the vocals carry exactly the required amount of desperation.

This is doom metal with actual movement.

Slow doesn’t mean stationary.

TodoMal understand the difference.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

6. Deliverance

Seven minutes and twenty-five seconds.

Right.

Put the kettle on first.

Actually, don’t.

You’ll miss something.

Deliverance is the album’s longest track and one of its emotional centrepieces.

TodoMal allow the composition to unfold patiently rather than desperately sprinting towards a chorus.

Textures arrive.

Disappear.

Return.

The heavier sections feel enormous because of the quieter passages surrounding them.

And throughout everything runs the album’s central question:

Can you actually move beyond grief?

There’s no easy answer.

That’s precisely why the song works.

Absolutely stunning.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

7. Humanised Gods

One of the album’s more immediately accessible moments.

Don’t worry.

TodoMal haven’t suddenly gone pop-punk and started singing about summer holidays.

But Humanised Gods has a directness that separates it from some of the record’s more sprawling compositions.

The melody gets under your skin quickly.

Yet underneath it sits the same darkness that hangs over Graveyards of Joy.

Catchy doom?

Yeah.

Apparently that’s a thing.

And we’re here for it.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

8. For Mercy

Three minutes.

Quiet.

Fragile.

Devastating.

For Mercy feels like the moment after the storm when you’re finally able to examine what’s left behind.

There’s restraint everywhere.

TodoMal don’t need to throw another enormous riff at you.

They’ve already done the damage.

Instead, this penultimate piece creates space for the finale.

And suddenly the album’s title starts feeling considerably heavier.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

9. Graveyards of Joy

And here it is.

The destination.

Nearly seven minutes of everything TodoMal have been building towards.

The title track feels like an elegy.

Not simply for people.

For places.

Communities.

Memories.

Things that existed and slowly disappeared.

There’s enormous sadness here.

But here’s the important part:

There’s also light.

Not some ridiculous Hollywood ending where suddenly everything is fine.

Real grief doesn’t work like that.

Instead, TodoMal offer something more believable.

Acceptance.

Memory.

The possibility that something beautiful can exist alongside loss.

That’s why Graveyards of Joy is such a perfect title.

Joy doesn’t erase the graveyard.

It grows inside it.

A magnificent ending.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

🔥

The Breakdown

🎤

Vocals — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Deeply emotive without becoming theatrical for the sake of it.

There’s genuine vulnerability throughout the record, particularly during its quieter passages.

🎸

Guitars — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Huge when required.

But restraint is equally important.

TodoMal understand that one enormous riff surrounded by space can hit considerably harder than forty minutes of constant distortion.

🎹

Hammond & Keys — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Absolutely crucial.

The Hammond gives the record warmth, depth and occasional psychedelic colour without turning the whole thing into a retro-rock exercise.

🎻

Cinematic Elements — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

The Morricone-like strings are inspired.

They give Graveyards of Joy its enormous widescreen identity.

🌄

Atmosphere — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Ridiculous.

You can practically feel the dry Spanish landscape surrounding these songs.

✍️

Songwriting — 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Nine tracks.

Forty-three minutes.

Nothing wasted.

Everything feels connected.

🏆

Standout Tracks

🔥 Mare Ignis

🌑 Point of Coalescence

🖤 Deliverance

🙏 For Mercy

🪦 Graveyards of Joy

🌄

The Sound of Empty Spain

One of the most fascinating elements of Graveyards of Joy is its sense of place.

TodoMal aren’t writing about some imaginary gothic kingdom filled with castles and ravens.

Their landscape feels real.

The depopulated provinces of rural eastern Spain.

Ghost towns.

Empty communities.

Places where people once lived, worked, argued, loved and eventually disappeared.

That imagery gives the record enormous emotional power.

The emptiness becomes part of the music.

Long passages stretch towards the horizon.

Guitars appear like distant storms.

Strings evoke dusty western landscapes.

Silence becomes an instrument.

It’s doom metal connected to geography.

And that makes Graveyards of Joy feel remarkably distinctive.

🖤

Grief Without Surrender

The most impressive thing about this album isn’t its heaviness.

It’s its honesty.

Graveyards of Joy emerged from personal tragedy.

And you can feel that.

But TodoMal don’t romanticise grief.

They don’t turn suffering into some theatrical gothic costume.

Grief here feels messy.

Angry.

Lonely.

Exhausting.

Sometimes quiet.

Sometimes absolutely enormous.

Yet crucially, the record keeps searching.

For meaning.

For connection.

For whatever comes after the worst thing imaginable has already happened.

That’s where hope enters.

Not as an easy answer.

As survival.

🤘

The Riff Report Verdict

Doom metal has always understood grief.

But there’s a massive difference between music that sounds sad and music that actually understands sadness.

Graveyards of Joy belongs firmly in the second category.

TodoMal have created something intensely personal without making it inaccessible.

You don’t need to know the exact circumstances behind these songs.

You simply need to have lost something.

A person.

A place.

A relationship.

A version of yourself.

Something.

Then this record starts making sense.

Musically, it’s equally impressive.

Traditional doom provides the foundations, but TodoMal refuse to remain trapped inside them.

Hammond organ.

Folk.

Cinematic strings.

Space rock.

Alternative darkness.

Massive riffs.

Near silence.

Everything belongs.

Nothing feels thrown in simply to demonstrate how clever everyone is.

And across forty-three minutes, the album gradually transforms.

It begins surrounded by darkness.

It ends still carrying that darkness.

But now there’s something else beside it.

Light.

Tiny perhaps.

Distant.

But definitely there.

That’s Graveyards of Joy.

Not overcoming grief.

Learning how to carry it.

And somehow finding beauty growing among the ruins.

THE RIFF REPORT RATING

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

5/5 GUITARS

Desolate. Cinematic. Crushing. Beautiful.

TodoMal have created far more than another doom record. Graveyards of Joy is forty-three minutes of grief, landscape, memory and hard-won hope — an album that understands sometimes the heaviest thing in the room isn’t the riff.

Absolutely stunning. 🪦🌄🖤🤘