EPICA – The Final Lullaby (ft. Shining) (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

A volatile meeting of symphonic metal and blackjazz

With The Final Lullaby, Epica opens a door to a different corner of the heavy-music spectrum, inviting Shining’s Jørgen Munkeby to stitch saxophone, guitar, and vocals into the band’s widescreen symphonic metal. The result is a track that feels both precise and destabilizing, where classical grandeur rubs against abrasive textures and jazz-inflected lines. It serves as a vivid preview of The Alchemy Project, Epica’s collaborative release arriving on November 11.

Inside the arrangement

The Final Lullaby pivots on contrast. Orchestral swells and cinematic choral layers provide the bedrock, with guitars moving from palm-muted drive to more expansive chord work. The rhythm section favors momentum, pushing the verses forward with tight double-kick patterns before opening into a larger, more melodic chorus. Keyboards and orchestration color the spaces between riffs, underscoring modulations that add tension without derailing the song’s through line.

Against this, Munkeby’s saxophone arrives as a disruptive voice. It slices through the arrangement with brassy overtones and bursts of controlled dissonance, sometimes shadowing the guitar, at other times swerving across it. When the band leans heavier, the sax finds its own lane, bending notes and strafing the beat in a way that emphasizes the instability at the heart of the song. Guitar leads and sax phrases often respond to one another, like competing narrators telling the same story from different angles.

Voices at the center

Vocally, the track balances clarity and abrasion. Simone Simons anchors the melodic core with a luminous lead, delivering long-lined phrases that carry the chorus. Harsh vocals answer and interrupt, injecting grit that keeps the arrangement from settling into comfort. This clean-versus-harsh exchange heightens the lyric’s central tension and keeps the energy volatile even when the orchestration swells.

Thematically, The Final Lullaby frames the lullaby not as comfort but as confrontation. It reads like a farewell set against encroaching darkness, a meditation on endings that resists softness. The chorus embraces resolution, while the verses flicker with doubt. That friction, between poise and rupture, is exactly where Epica and Shining meet.

Saxophone and Shining’s imprint

Shining’s legacy of “blackjazz” experimentation threads through the song in how the saxophone behaves less like ornament and more like an additional guitar with its own harmonic agenda. Munkeby’s tone shifts from breathy insinuation to serrated attack, occasionally overblown to push into the red. In heavier passages, he rides the rhythm with clipped stabs and syncopated accents. In the breaks, he stretches out, hinting at modal ideas that tug the harmony off its axis. His guitar work mirrors that sensibility, tightening the screws on the riffing while preserving forward motion.

Crucially, the sax does not dilute the heaviness. It reframes it. By choosing timbres that do not typically coexist, the song heightens its sense of looming consequence. The interplay feels less like fusion for its own sake and more like a deliberate test of metal’s boundaries, one that never loses track of impact.

Visual framing

Directed by Jens De Vos, the video places the performance front and center, capturing the volatility of the collaboration without excessive narrative distraction. The camerawork by Glenn Verdickt and Nick Suchak focuses on gestures that tell the story of the arrangement: breath hitting the sax reed, sticks biting into cymbals, fingers articulating fast passages on the fretboard, and the physicality of the vocal exchanges. Quick cuts accent rhythmic accents, while longer shots allow the chorus to bloom. The production emphasizes proximity, as if the camera were another instrument inside the mix.

Part of The Alchemy Project

The Final Lullaby is one of the keystones of The Alchemy Project, a seven-track, guest-driven release that pairs Epica with artists across extreme metal, symphonic rock, and experimental music. The lineup ranges from full-band collisions to pinpoint cameos by singular voices. Contributors include, among others, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Phil Lanzon of Uriah Heep, Tommy Karevik of Kamelot, Charlotte Wessels, Myrkur, Frank Schiphorst, Björn “Speed” Strid, Henri Sattler, Sven de Caluwé, Asim Searah, Niilo Sevänen, and Roel van Helden.

Rather than stacking features on top of a fixed template, the project treats each pairing as a lab bench. The Final Lullaby exemplifies the approach: pull one unexpected element into Epica’s orbit, allow it to reshape the gravitational field, and write to that new center of mass. The release date of November 11 positions the record as a late-year statement, and this single lays out the thesis with clarity.

Why it matters

Metal’s vocabulary expands when unfamiliar instruments are given equal footing with guitars and drums, not just cameo space. The Final Lullaby demonstrates what happens when a saxophone is invited to antagonize the harmony instead of smoothing it, and when symphonic metal welcomes abrasion not as a color, but as a pillar. It is a calculated risk that pays off in intensity, emphasizing the song’s sense of final reckoning while keeping the melodic core intact.

Credits and release information

Song: The Final Lullaby
Artists: Epica featuring Jørgen Munkeby of Shining (saxophone, guitar, vocals)
From: The Alchemy Project
Release date: November 11
Video director: Jens De Vos
Camera: Glenn Verdickt, Nick Suchak