Nick Holmes — born in England in 1971 — is Paradise Lost's singer and co-founder, and one of the few singers in metal to travel the whole road from guttural to clean singing, and then back again. On the early records, Lost Paradise (1990) and Gothic (1991), he used a death metal growl over dragging tempos — a combination that founded death-doom and gave a genre its name: the second album christened gothic metal. From Icon (1993) and above all Draconian Times (1995), Holmes abandoned the growl and developed a deep, melancholy baritone, closer to Sisters of Mercy than to any extreme metal band. That change was decisive. Without it Paradise Lost would not have reached the audience it reached nor influenced bands such as Katatonia and Anathema — and the whole of European gothic metal would sound different. In the 2010s he made the reverse journey: he took up guttural vocals again on records such as The Plague Within (2015) and Medusa (2017), without abandoning the clean register. Few singers keep both techniques in simultaneous use after thirty years. He also sings in Bloodbath, the Swedish death metal project he has belonged to since 2014.
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