2021 through their own newly founded label Red Creek Recordings. "The Raging River feels more like a bridge. A midpoint that needs to be crossed so we can finish what we started with 2019's 'A Dawn to Fear,'" the band adds. On November 4, 2021, Cult of Luna announced the release of a new album titled The Long Road North for February 11, 2022. Musical style and influences Cult of Luna's sound has progressed from early material being heavily doom metal-influenced to one much less aggressive and more concerned with orchestration. Fans and critics have termed this sound post-metal, progressive metal, sludge metal, and doom metal. The band is considered to be at the forefront of the genre, along with contemporary proponents Neurosis and Isis. Its songs are often long, slow, repetitive and crushing, heavy sections of distorted guitars often interspersed with orchestral interludes and extended, post-rock-esque forays. The group shuns conventional song structures, opting for a sound that evolves throughout a song, sometimes toward a climactic crescendo, instead of a verse-chorus-verse pattern. That style, incorporating sections of "light and dark" into their music, has led to comparisons with contemporaries such as Isis (with whom they have toured), Callisto and Pelican, as well as the significantly older Neurosis. Former singer Klas Rydberg, however, has stated that decidedly Radiohead are an influence. Themes As the band progressed, the imagery they employed became less overt and less "doom metal". In some ways, the albums showed a shift from anger with modern society as in Cult of Luna, to disgust with the ruling parties in The Beyond and Salvation. The video for single "Leave Me Here" is concerned with propaganda and tacit governmental control over the individual. Similar concerns are addressed in contemporaries Isis' Panopticon, centered on the theme of Big Brother-like government surveillance. Early material made Christian references; to the devil, Faust and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Over the course of the following albums, these seem to have disappeared, though Salvation does have overarching spiritual themes. Somewhere Along the Highway is slightly different from the previous releases in its thematic basis. It focuses on personal matters, specifically male loneliness, instead of macroscopic concerns addressed in the previous albums. Members Current Magnus Líndberg – percussion, guitar (1998–present) Johannes Persson – guitars, vocals (1998–present) Andreas Johansson – bass (2002–present) Thomas Hedlund – drums (2003–present) Fredrik Kihlberg – guitar, vocals (2004–present) Kristian Karlsson