The Mission - Songs For Kith & Kin

Forty years after Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams walked out of the Sisters of Mercy and launched The Mission with God’s Own Medicine, the band returns with its first new studio album since 2016’s Another Fall From Grace. It very nearly didn’t arrive on schedule. Originally planned for 2025, the record was put on hold when Hussey underwent open-heart surgery, and that brush with mortality and the long road back run straight through these songs. Titles like “Operation Chaos” and “Arrhythmia” leave little doubt about where the story starts.

Sonically, this is the big, chiming Mission sound that made Children a number two album in the UK, with Hussey and Simon Hinkler’s interlocking guitars front and center and Adams anchoring the low end alongside drummer Alex Baum. Hussey produced the album himself, cutting it at Faro House Studios in José Ignacio, Uruguay, with additional orchestral sessions in Montevideo, and the arrangements stretch out with keyboards, sitar and tamboura. Lead single “Kindness Is A Weapon” blends classic Mission shimmer with a classic rock swagger and a lyric about answering hostility with grace.

Across 15 tracks, the album moves from personal and societal crisis toward family, friendship and the question of where home really is, which is exactly what the title promises. It closes with “The Last Leaf On The Tree,” a quietly devastating finale that lands as one of the most affecting moments in the band’s catalog.

Due April 2, 2027 on Cooking Vinyl, this double LP edition spreads the full 15-song album across two discs. A welcome return from one of the defining bands of British gothic rock.