There are plenty of reasons for an artist to go back and revisit an album. Maybe enough time has passed that the songs have changed with them, maybe the production never quite captured what was inside their head, or sometimes they simply reckon they can do the whole bloody thing better.
VESSELES founder Valira didn’t wait ten or twenty years. The original Home only arrived in January 2026, yet on March 26th, 2027, the record returns as Home (Reclaimed). This isn’t a remaster, some anniversary exercise or a few new vocals thrown over the top. Valira has stepped completely into the vocal role themselves, reshaped melodies, altered lyrics and gone back through an album that was always deeply personal to make the voice telling that story unmistakably their own.
I had spent plenty of time with Home (Reclaimed) before sitting down with Valira for Crannk, but the deeper I went into it, the more connections started appearing. Mirrors reach backwards into I Am A Demon. Red stone returns. “Dysphoria” seems to cast a shadow far beyond the EP it first appeared on, while even words and perspectives begin changing as Valira moves from collective ideas of “we” and “us” towards something much more direct.
I.
That is where this whole idea of reclamation gets really fucking interesting.
Before The Beneath, There Was Evanescence
Before VESSELES had The Beneath, demonic rituals, black mirrors or cursed sludge consuming humanity, one of the earliest doors into darker music for Valira came through Evanescence.
When I asked about that earliest core musical memory, Valira pointed towards hearing the band’s first album and the moment music stopped being something they simply enjoyed and began becoming something more. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision to start creating darker music. It was more the discovery that music could sound like that.
Listening to VESSELES now, the connection might seem like a massive leap until you start pulling at the pieces. Piano is everywhere. Orchestration is not simply there to make the riffs sound bigger; it carries emotion. Clean vocals stretch into these haunting melodic passages before everything can collapse back into black metal aggression.
Valira still returns to Evanescence and acknowledged that Amy Lee’s approach continues to influence the cleaner side of their own vocals. After listening to Home (Reclaimed), that made complete sense to me. The clean vocals don’t feel like an attempt to soften VESSELES. If anything, some of those melodies make the darker moments feel even more unsettling, and that contrast has become part of the project’s identity.
Knowing What You Are Is Only The First Question
Going back through I Am A Demon before this interview changed the way I heard Home. The EP feels like recognition, a statement of identity and the process of making that identity real through music.
Then comes the harder question: if you know what you are, where the fuck do you belong?
Interestingly, Valira didn’t already have Home sitting there as chapter two while writing I Am A Demon. The next step revealed itself later, and that seems to be a pretty important part of how VESSELES works. Because this project is so closely tied to what Valira is exploring at a particular point in their life, they can’t necessarily map the next three records years in advance. The music and themes arrive when the next question becomes clear.
There are still clues sitting inside the earlier material. “Dysphoria” already carries images of red stone, reflections and that feeling of existing somewhere you simply cannot remain. Valira told me those connections weren’t deliberately planted as some grand plan for Home, but looking backwards, the DNA is absolutely there. Sometimes the same images return because the original question never really went away.
Becoming The VESSELES Vocalist Was Always The Plan
This was one of the biggest things I took away from our conversation. Valira taking over the vocals wasn’t some sudden response to the original Home. It was always where VESSELES was meant to go.
When I Am A Demon arrived, Valira was already learning how to scream but didn’t feel ready to carry an entire record vocally, so the work continued in the background while the project moved forward. Once Valira began handling backing vocals live, though, actually hearing and feeling their own voice inside these songs changed something.
They described that first experience as awakening a deeper connection to music than they had felt before.
That moment is really the heart of Home (Reclaimed) for me. You can research all the lyrical changes, compare song lengths and pull apart arrangements, but the reason this record exists ultimately comes back to somebody standing onstage and suddenly feeling a connection that wasn’t there before.
Former vocalist Joel Ferry played an important part in what happened next too. Rather than making that handover awkward, Valira spoke warmly about Joel pushing them towards something they were probably taking too long to commit to: stop waiting, take over and do your thing.
After Valira performed the full vocal role at the Home album release show, the difference became impossible to ignore. The songs had changed simply because the person at their centre had changed, and recording them again suddenly made sense.
From “We” To “I”
Once Valira became the voice, the words started changing too.
This was one of those little things I noticed digging through the reclaimed singles before the interview. Home (Reclaimed) isn’t simply the same lyrics delivered by a different vocalist. There are changes inside “Eternally Within Us,” “Until They Are Dust” and elsewhere, and when I asked Valira about it, one answer really stood out.
A lot of the original lyrics were written through collective language: we and us. With Valira now singing them, that distance didn’t always make sense anymore, so the language began becoming more personal. This is their story, and they are now the person telling it.
Some changes came from phrasing. Valira’s vocal style naturally sits differently from Joel’s, so rhythms needed to move and words had to be rearranged. Elsewhere, Valira simply wanted a clean melody where there hadn’t been one before or heard another way a section could work.
It wasn’t a case of hitting record and recreating an old vocal performance.
“I reevaluated the whole album, basically.”
That might be the best description of Home (Reclaimed) there is.
Opening The Album Back Up
I went particularly nerdy on this one before the interview and noticed that the song lengths between the two versions aren’t identical either. Eight of the nine tracks move slightly. “Until They Are Dust” becomes longer, “This Is Not Home” gets shorter, and when you add in the altered lyrics, vocal melodies and harmonies, you quickly realise that once Valira opened this thing back up, there was plenty of room to start pulling at threads.
Thankfully, there was also a deadline. Valira had only a couple of months to properly prepare for taking over every vocal at the album release show. That forced them to buckle down, go through the songs and make the changes that mattered without disappearing down an endless rabbit hole of revision, and that work then carried straight into the studio.
Nick Loiacono became especially important when it came to the new vocal harmonies. Valira described him as a craftsman with that side of the production, knowing when to move between high and low harmonies, when a note should hang in the air and when another voice should shift underneath it.
You can hear that attention throughout Reclaimed. The vocals don’t just sit on top of these songs anymore; they move through them.
“Until They Are Dust” Finally Felt Like Valira’s Song
One of the clearest examples of what changed is “Until They Are Dust (Reclaimed).” The song wasn’t pushed as one of the original Home singles, but this time it is right near the front of the campaign and has its own music video.
When I asked why, Valira gave me an answer I wasn’t expecting. They had actually been a little unsure about the original version because there was something about it they didn’t completely connect with.
Then they rebuilt the vocals.
The new melodies and harmonies changed their relationship with the track so dramatically that it became one of Valira’s favourite songs on the album. There is something inside the chorus and its melodic movement that still hits them every time, even if they can’t fully explain why.
I love that because you can spend hours pulling apart composition, production and theory, but sometimes a piece of music just suddenly feels right. For Valira, the reclaimed version finally did, and that is also why it became such an important single. If Home (Reclaimed) is supposed to show how far VESSELES has moved, then “Until They Are Dust” might be one of the clearest places to hear it.
The Beneath Keeps Getting Stranger
The deeper I went into the lyrics, the more The Beneath stopped feeling like some simple demonic kingdom sitting underneath everything.
It starts feeling alive.
“Eternally Within Us” gives us ritual, ceremony, congregation and birth, while “Until They Are Dust” takes things somewhere even more fucked up, describing this cursed substance that consumes humans before producing a new generation of demons. The Beneath doesn’t simply house these beings; it creates them.
That world-building becomes even more interesting when you place it beside what Valira is actually asking throughout Home. If The Beneath is part of these demons, if its origins are already ingrained within them, why does Home still need to be somewhere else?
That question stopped Valira for a moment during our conversation. Their answer came back to the difference between a physical home and the feeling of home, because those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
You can know where you supposedly come from and still feel completely displaced. You can long for somewhere else while also realising that the feeling you are chasing may have to be created wherever you actually are. That idea eventually becomes crucial to “This Is Not Home,” where the search begins turning into action.
The Mirrors Keep Following Valira
I love digging into lyrical callbacks, and the mirror imagery throughout VESSELES sent me straight back down that rabbit hole.
It begins clearly in “Dysphoria,” with that disconnect between the internal self and whatever reflection is staring back. Across Home, the mirror imagery mutates. It becomes a chasm, the reflections stop recognising Valira and by the time we reach “Perpetual Chasm of Black Mirrors,” they feel like voids capable of swallowing everything around them.
Valira is very deliberate with this stuff. They told me they enjoy returning to words, images and phrases from older songs and altering them slightly as the story and their own perspective changes.
Mirrors are perfect for that because the object itself doesn’t really do anything differently. A mirror reflects what is standing in front of it; what changes is how you see the reflection. Depending on where your head is at, exactly the same image can feel completely different.
That is the sort of metaphor Valira can keep bringing back because it evolves without needing the physical object to change at all. Once you start seeing those connections, I Am A Demon and Home stop feeling like separate releases and begin looking more like different stages of the same ongoing conversation.
“This Is Not Home” Sent Me Back To “Dysphoria”
The strongest example of that came when I returned to “Dysphoria.” By the time I had been through Home (Reclaimed) properly, “This Is Not Home” started sounding less like a standalone finale and more like an answer to something that began on the EP.
Red stone comes back. Dysphoria itself comes back. That feeling of desperately wanting Home while knowing you cannot remain where you are comes back, but the emotional response is different.
Valira told me the connection wasn’t consciously written as a direct sequel, but they absolutely wanted the perspective to change. “Dysphoria” ends in a far more hopeless place, with this sense that the situation simply exists and there isn’t much that can be done about it.
By the end of “This Is Not Home,” that helplessness has turned into something else. If the world around Valira doesn’t feel like Home, then maybe the answer is to change the fucking world around them.
That doesn’t magically resolve everything, but it gives the character agency, and that confidence runs through Home much more strongly than it did through I Am A Demon. The first release says this is what I am. The next asks where do I belong? Home (Reclaimed) adds another layer: this is my voice telling you.
The Next Chapter Has Already Started
Naturally, I had to ask where the hell VESSELES can go after all of that, and Valira already knows, or at least they know where the search begins.
Work has started on the album that will follow Home, and once again the musical direction and the thematic direction are developing together. The next record will return to dysphoria, but not from the same place heard on I Am A Demon.
Valira wants to explore how their relationship with it has changed over the years and how their perspective continues to evolve. Even while writing the next record, that relationship may change again before the album is finished.
That feels completely right for VESSELES. This project has never really been about reaching one neat final answer and locking it in forever. It has been about documenting what the answer looks like right now, then following it when it inevitably changes shape again.
Reclamation Isn’t The Ending
The more I sat with this interview afterwards, the more the evolution of VESSELES itself started reflecting the music.
Valira created the project as a deeply personal outlet. At first, somebody else had to be the voice because Valira wasn’t ready yet. Then came the backing vocals, the live awakening, Joel giving them the shove they needed, the album release show, the decision to record everything again and eventually the movement from we towards I.
That is why Home (Reclaimed) works as a title. It isn’t about pretending the original Home never happened. That record had to exist for Valira to reach this version of it, and reclamation here means being able to return to something that was already yours and finally inhabit every part of it.
The compositions, lyrics and mythology were already Valira’s, and now the voice crawling out of The Beneath belongs to Valira too.
VESSELES release Home (Reclaimed) independently on March 26th, 2027.
Check out the full Crannk interview with Valira as we dive into the origins of VESSELES, the lasting influence of Evanescence, why Home needed to be reclaimed, taking over the vocal role, rebuilding the lyrics and harmonies, “Until They Are Dust,” the mythology of The Beneath, mirrors and dysphoria, and where this whole bloody story might head next.
VESSELES Is:
Valira Nyvran – vocals, guitars, composition, orchestrations, lyrics
Ron Graves – bass
Nikolas Brön – drums
Connect With VESSELES:
Website: https://vesseles.com/
Music and merch: https://vesseles.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vesseles/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Vesseles
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vesseles666/
Everything else: https://linktr.ee/vesseles
