– The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster, 1909

One of the most admirable qualities about musicians working in the progressive genres is their openness to new ideas. Indeed, it’s one of the guiding tenets of composing and listening to progressive music. Unbeholden to the conventions and tropes of other genres, true prog manifests as a willingness to push boundaries; it becomes an almost kleptocratic impulse to look across the entire musical spectrum, take the bits that work, and fit them into your own style. Perhaps the most obvious example of progressing genres forward is Meshuggah’s invention of a whole new rhythmic paradigm which has come to define the progressive music of the twenty-first century, birthed a genre, and begat a whole new subgenre thereafter¹. Recently, artists in progressive music have begun to incorporate microtonal elements (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, The Mercury Tree, Kostnatění), leading to a whole new tonal language to play with. Meanwhile, French group Mantra masterminded Medium, an album with two tracks that can be played either separately or simultaneously to “create” a third song. The progressive spirit is insatiable and willing to try anything. Even an idea that may well break music. 

The rollout of so-called AI has happened at an inexorable pace, and as a result you’ll likely be familiar with its roll-out either in your job, your personal life, or just from the relentless pace of the news about it. While AI may or may not have utility in realms like medicine and science, we’re going to focus on how it pertains to art, and more specifically music. You’ll like have seen “AI art” in some form or another. Facebook has been flooded with plausible algorithmically generated pictures of idyllic scenes in order to farm views for money; Twitter (now known by its dwindling user base as X) is beholden to a Musk-made chatbot called Grok which kept telling users, including its creator, that they’re basically fascists, until they fiddled with its programming and made it a fascist itself; and Instagram has repeatedly shown me videos from an account where a scene from a video game plays while artificially simulated voices of Stewie and Peter Griffin from Family Guy dissect the history of a particular classic prog band. Last year, in an effort to make a small stand against AI slop in our scene, we published a short PSA saying that we would call out AI art used to make album covers, and requested bands credit the artists they work with so we could credit them in turn. We felt the gesture important, but perhaps it’s insignificant when so many genre giants are willing to play with a technology which stands in stark opposition to the creative impulse and contains much broader threats within its scope.

Introducing the Disrupters 

I know your face, I know your voice
I know your girls, I know your boys
I am the lover of your life (and a handy light at night)
I am the apple of your eye. 

– Life in the Wires Pt.1, Frost*

In a piece for The New Yorker, the sci-fi short story writer Ted Chiang writes that most art “requires an intention to communicate”. While there’s no universally agreed upon definition of art, it being a broad and nebulous thing, for the purposes of this essay, the general tendency for art to have an intention to communicate is key. Think of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in which Cameron stares awestruck into the pointillist masterwork of George Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. We don’t know what he’s feeling, but that the piece has touched him deeply is clear, and the scene is one of the best depictions of the power of art. A melody in a song, a face in a painting, a sentence in a novel—all can hit us like an emotional freight train. In the moment that an artist has communicated with us, a transference of ideas through a transitive medium that acts as a middle man through space and time takes place. What we get out of their art may not be what they intended. Ray Bradbury famously argued about this issue with a class of students studying his famous book-burning dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451; to him, the book was meant to be a warning about television. However, to basically everyone else who has ever read it, the book communicated a chilling tale of censorship taken to a terrible extreme. Nevertheless, such examples show that communication of a sort has nevertheless taken place. 

This communication is achieved because artists make choices. Chiang argues that art is the product of a series of choices made by an artist: every word in a novel, and every brushstroke of a painting is a choice. In music, the complexity of choices is immense: notes, instruments and their interactions, vibrato, tone, effects, production and a vast range more. With generative AI, people have been able to generate images, stories, and even music. But the number of choices made is minimal. As Chiang says:

When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices. If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.

The same is true of AI music. Google, the company that dropped their infamous slogan “don’t be evil” when it became apparent they could no longer live up to that standard, utilises a database based on two million sound clips, mostly YouTube music clips, for its music generating AI program, Audioset. All the interacting choices usually handled by artists are instead being handed over to algorithms which draw on datasets of granularly analysed audio samples to make plausible decisions as to how your prompt should sound based on how all other music sounds. The result is a distillation, and herein is its anti-creative ethos. A human may be influenced by hundreds of different factors—god knows we’ve reviewed our fair share of bands who made the choice to sound like Opeth or Tool or Dream Theater—but it’s nevertheless a choice. Handing so many decisions over to a generative AI means that almost all opportunities for originality are neatly avoided. Of course, this is the point, as Mikey Schulman, CEO of the AI music company Suno said: “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software… I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” Of course, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of why people engage with and produce art; as Chiang puts it, “Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium.”

We now have a wealth of examples within the prog and metal scenes of AI use. Most of these are, thankfully, restricted to album art. Among bands we’ve reviewed, Time Voyager by Barock Project, The Path of Decoherence by Advocacy, and, possibly, The Lightbringers by Orion (art “by” Hugh Syme) all spring to mind. Veteran Floridian death metal outfit Deicide courted controversy after adorning their thirteenth album, Banished by Sin, with dreadful AI art; frontman Glen Benton responded with typical sang froid. Dream Theater’s longtime album artist, Hugh Syme, was also implicated by internet sleuths postulating that inconsistencies on the cover for latest release Parasomnia might be explained by AI use². Small artists with a tight budget utilising AI to generate their album art is understandable. It’s less forgivable for established groups with money at their disposal who could easily commission or license artwork from a human artist to utilise generative AI, let alone for established artists themselves, like (allegedly) Hugh Syme to lazily start using AI. Some artists stand by their use of the insurgent tech, others cave to fan pressure, as Pestilence did last year after presenting an AI cover for their greatest hits album, Levels of Perception.

AI album art is the thin end of the wedge. In the underground, some would-be artists are experimenting rather more heavily with AI. A content creator under the moniker D1G1T4L RU1N uses AI to create albums in a variety of genres—the second album of this project shows that sex doesn’t always sell: the AI synthwave record has zero downloads, despite the AI-rendered cover art of a large-chested, conventionally attractive woman³. A “label” called Rift Reaper Records (since removed from Bandcamp) took it a step further, inventing a roster of bands and their new releases collected under one umbrella. The music, as is often the case, sounded passable but uncanny. Singers tended to sound overly digitised, the production had a strange stereo vibe, and one could tell when the track had been edited thanks to incongruous changes in vocal style or instrumentation, the product of new prompts being inserted.

These people, whom I’m loath to call artists, utilise generative AI music apps like Udio and Suno to make their compositions. Such apps offer a range of tools. A user can write a prompt, e.g. “make a thrash song in the vein of Metallica” and receive an output that gives you perhaps two minutes of plausibly Metallica-esque generated slop (which sounds a lot like a description of the last couple of Metallica albums anyway). But with advanced tools, one can edit the initial result: add intros, instrumental sections, codas, change instruments, insert a solo. Doubtlessly, one has to know their way around these technologies to create twenty-minute songs, as many of these content creators do, but we come back to the Chiang problem: while these people make some choices, the bulk are made by the algorithms, and many of those are important qualitative choices. A real band making real music slapping AI art onto their album cover is annoying, but at least the music is real. Nearly everything about these exclusively AI creators, however, is artificial. 

In recent weeks, internet sleuths have uncovered a band called The Velvet Sundown, a blues group with over 1.3 million⁴ monthly Spotify listeners and 48,000 followers at the time of writing (a huge jump from 1,500 followers, just days before)⁵. The group’s two albums were released on June 5th and June 20th of this year, and the album art and band photo are clearly AI generated. The music is, too. Their Spotify bio even comes with an endorsement from Billboard: “They sound like the memory of something you never lived, and somehow make it feel real.” That quote, as you may have guessed, isn’t real; Billboard never said that. In an article for MusicAlly, writer Stuart Dredge points out that their Spotify “popularity” is largely generated by four Spotify accounts seeding their popular, pre-existing playlists with the content of this AI generated band: 

Take Extra Music for example. Its profile has just under 3,000 followers, but its ‘Vietnam War Music‘ playlist has 629,311 saves (accounts adding it to their libraries). The 330-song playlist has tracks from a host of Vietnam War-era artists: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Rolling Stones, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix. Oh, and The Velvet Sundown, whose tracks are nestled at numbers 24, 34, 43, 52, 61, 70, 79, 88, 97, 106, 115, 124, 133, 142, 151, 160, 169, 178, 187, 196, 205, 214, 223, 232, 241 and 250 in its running order. 26 tracks in all – 7.9% of the entire playlist for a band with no obvious ties to the war.

It’s not just Spotify. The Velvet Sundown’s music is available on all of the main music platforms, though Spotify is the one with the most obvious public metrics. Deezer, which has its own AI detection software, has flagged the band’s music as “AI generated content”, and the site estimates that around 20,000 uploaded tracks per day, around 18% of the total uploaded per day, are made with AI. Outside of those main music platforms, you’ll often find nothing. Though the band bio names band members—”vocalist and mellotron sorcerer Gabe Farrow, guitarist Lennie West, bassist-synth alchemist Milo Rains, and free-spirited percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar”—these people don’t exist, they return no search results⁶. The only purpose of the music is to harvest money from disingenuously obtained streams. Out of curiosity, I looked up the top band in the “fans also like” section on Spotify and that group, Flaherty Brotherhood, was also AI generated (as attested to by Deezer); if AI bands are finding themselves recommended in similar places, it suggests their promoters may be coordinating on pushing multiple groups.

While seeding playlists is one tactic for farming listens, one can’t discount the possibility that bot accounts are being set up to artificially bolster the listener and follower counts of fictitious bands; indeed, this is an existing problem with streaming services, and investigations by Wired suggest that bot accounts are artificially inflating the listens of AI generated music. The Velvet Sundown’s 1.3 million monthly listeners, while likely not an enduring figure, is equivalent to some of the largest bands in the prog scene—Dream Theater can boast 1.6 million at the time of writing. And yet these AI bands have virtually no internet presence beyond the streaming platforms. These fake artists live in a bubble of artificiality: non-existent accounts endlessly streaming the AI generated music of non-existent people, an entire fictive, digital world coexisting and bleeding into the wider, human-occupied internet. Naturally, a whole industry is being built to cash in on the AI music grift: free YouTube courses or cheap video tuition; a four week online course with the prestigious Berklee College of Music (worth one credit) that costs a cool $515; or a class run by an MIT alumnus—which, like every underground trad prog project ever, features a guest appearance from Jordan Rudess (who we’ll hear more from later)—that retails at an eye-watering $1,500. 

While greedy exploiters cash-in on the latest money-making scheme, it’s only a lucky few who will achieve The Velvet Sundown’s levels of virality. The bulk of these AI projects will be lost amid the clutter of new music releases, and most listeners will likely reject what they hear if they hear anything, repelled by the low quality and uncanniness of the music. However, as the technology improves, telling the difference will become increasingly difficult; artists who may not be using AI could be implicated if their music seems suspect, as in the recent case of Draugveil’s debut whose music and realness has been called into question but with seemingly little evidence. In the meantime, these AI communities support one another because they’re all adherents to the potential powers and possibilities of the technology, powers that extend far beyond music.

The_Book_of_Revelation.epub: A Brief Aside on the Cult of AI

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral – first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.

– The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen 

Most readers will have glimpsed the contents of the slop-bucket that AI ‘art’ has created. From an AI stand-up special by deceased comedian George Carlin (the provenance of which may actually have been human comedians pretending to be AI), to terrible AI-generated Spongebob Squarepants covers of popular songs which led to hasty legislation protecting a person’s right to their voice likeness, the internet has been flooded with countless examples. The journalist Robert Evans has described this trend as “cultural necrophilia”: these algorithms, trained on the sum of human art, are robbing from the dead, as well as the living. Evans is something of an aficionado when it comes to cults, and cultishness is inherent to the AI movement. Silicon Valley has become a breeding ground for subcultures and communities with fanatical tendencies, from cult-like work environments in tech companies organised around a Dear Leader to a slew of cult and cult-adjacent movements such as the rationalists, post-rationalists, effective accelerationists, and the Zizians. As an anonymous former Google engineer put it: “If your product isn’t amenable to spontaneously producing a cult, it’s probably not impactful enough.” 

Inherent to these groups is an almost messianic belief in the advent of artificial general intelligence (the classic sci-fi idea of “AI” as a sentient humanlike intelligence), taking them down all sorts of strange and unethical paths. In the effective altruism and accelerationist movements, this has manifested as a reticence to address ethical concerns, such as those surrounding deepfake pornography or algorithmic bias, on the grounds that it would limit the development of artificial general intelligence. At its furthest extreme, we get the strange case of the Zizians, and their belief in the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment, the gist of which is that an otherwise benevolent godlike AI could come into existence and choose to punish all those who knew of its potential existence but did not work towards its creation. The Basilisk is essentially a restatement of Pascal’s Wager, the idea that a rational person should believe in God and behave as though He exists because the infinite torment of Hell isn’t worth the risk, and it has surprising traction—it’s how Elon Musk and Grimes met. In the case of the Zizians, their belief in Roko’s Basilisk and the justification of all their actions in order to bring about the coming AI God ultimately led to the murder of at least six people. 

Cults committing murders is the extreme end of this thinking, but a Messianic fervor suffuses Silicon Valley. The prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claims in his Techo-Optimist Manifesto⁷: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder,” which is clearly a very dangerous assertion to make. Andreessen, a lifelong Democrat, supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, citing concerns that Joe Biden would regulate AI, which Andreessen had heavily invested in; indeed, the entire tech sphere’s sudden pivot to support of the Republican party was largely motivated by such concerns, and it’s paid off for them. When the US Copyright Office asserted its position on AI content earlier this year—“making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries”—President Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the Office’s Director. More worryingly still, Trump’s ridiculously named “Big Beautiful Bill” that just passed contains a clause that bans regulation on AI for ten years.

What one has to bear in mind is that their faith in the power of AI to come is just that: faith. While the science is by no means settled, tech experts suggest the current type of LLM-based AI inherently lacks the traits to ever achieve the artificial general intelligence that these gurus crave, regardless of increasing sophistication; the method by which tech is currently seeking to push towards sentient AI may well be a complete non-starter. Indeed, in The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, the authors recall that “a paper written by OpenAI researchers… determined what kinds of tasks in what kinds of jobs could be handled by an LLM by asking the LLM itself.” There’s a circular logic at play in Silicon Valley, a willingness to believe an experimental machine’s algorithmic, ego-pleasing answers. A similar messianic fervour came with the crypto boom of recent years and the adjacent run on NFTs. True believers hailed the advent of an alternative to banking which avoided cruel government oversight; when thousands became victims of pump-and-dump schemes and fraud, people began to suggest that perhaps their deregulated currency needed banks to help regulate them.

One might reasonably wonder what Spotify’s stake is in the AI game, especially when, as we’ve seen, their platform is allowing the proliferation of AI music. Given that Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, recently invested $690 million into the defence company Helsing, which is developing AI-enhanced military hardware, the outlook doesn’t look all that promising. Indeed, Ek partnered with everyone’s favourite innovator in the domain of ranking female college students by their attractiveness, Mark Zuckerberg, to release a joint statement persuading Europe to embrace open-source AI, of the poorly regulated kind that LLMs are based on. While the statement makes some valid points regarding the inconsistency of European laws, the ultimate thrust is clear, jettison restrictions on AI content so they can bring you worthless products: “Given the current regulatory uncertainty, Meta won’t be able to release upcoming models like Llama multimodal, which has the capability to understand images.” Again, these billionaires only wish is to encourage countries to deregulate in order for them to hawk their dubious wares. 

The section of the Zuckerberg/Ek statement regarding Spotify is particularly galling: 

Looking back, it’s clear that our early investment in AI made the company what it is today: a personalised experience for every user that has led to billions of discoveries of artists and creators around the world. As we look to the future of streaming, we see tremendous potential to use open-source AI to benefit the industry. This is especially important when it comes to how AI can help more artists get discovered. A simplified regulatory structure would not only accelerate the growth of open-source AI but also provide crucial support to European developers and the broader creator ecosystem that contributes to and thrives on these innovations.

Given Spotify’s widespread renown as a platform that pays artists an insulting pittance per stream (maybe some of that $690 million could’ve gone towards paying artists fairly?), and the fact that the generative AI used on 2024’s Spotify Wrapped feature delivered such useless results that it caused a backlash, trumpeting anything about the Spotify experience beggars belief. It’s perhaps unsurprising that a company as distinctly unscrupulous as Spotify would take such a line on AI, but it’s nevertheless worth noting. These investors and company executives fear industry regulation on AI because they’ve invested unimaginable sums of money in it. Sold by tech companies as this cutting-edge technology that you simply have to use in order to not be left behind, those who are susceptible to such heavily-marketed fads partake and find, lo’ and behold, a product which takes the decision-making process out of art, and an all-powerful thing to evangelise about. If every piece of information can legally be harnessed by users of generative AI, then companies and users alike can reap immense profits from content they don’t own and have no right to own. I don’t claim to be a legal scholar, but that sounds rather a lot like theft. The internet has always been a regulatory wild west, but we need to catch up fast. Thank god the real artists haven’t been taken in by this stuff. 

Terror & Hubris in the AI-Generated House of Jordan Rudess 

There walks a god among us
Who’s seen the writing on the wall
He is the revolution
He’ll be the one to save us all.

– The Gift of Music, Dream Theater

The keyboardist and pianist Jordan Rudess is a musical institution. A child prodigy, he attended esteemed music college The Juilliard School when he was just nine years old. His work with Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment is widely lauded; he’s performed guest spots with a litany of great artists from Steven Wilson and Ayreon to Gleb Kolyadin and Richard Henshall; and his masturbatory excesses in his solo project inspired one of the most disgustingly funny reviews in music criticism. He’s also the founder of Wizdom Music, a software company dedicated to developing apps that explore new virtual avenues for music creation and breaking down the process of composition. Wizdom has released a number of apps, the most notable of which is GeoShred, a guitar simulator with a breadth of customisability. While such innovations are legitimately great tools for artists, it should come as no surprise that a technophile like Rudess also showed an early interest in AI. If you journey to his Instagram page you’ll be inundated with content relating to the various AI companies he’s endorsing and partnering with; he’s even working with the music labs at MIT on the potential applications of AI. 

Sometimes you can just watch him shred or talk theory, and at other times you’ll end up watching videos he edited in Videoleap by Lightricks, an app that apparently allows him to turn himself into a character from The Polar Express who plays piano amid roiling clouds with an ever-changing number of fingers. Partnering with AI start-ups like Udio and Moises, Rudess highlights their capabilities, such as remixing generated rhythms and stem-splitting. The strange thing about all these apps is how unimpressive they are. Some of the features offered, such as stem-splitting, are certainly useful, but Udio is hardly the first to offer this technology—stem-splitting is a free plugin for Audacity (Audacity offers AI-based and manual options). As for breaking down chords for songs in real-time, yes, it’s a useful feature, but it also takes some of the fun out of learning; guesswork is often what yields the real artistic eureka moments. More crucially, preliminary research from MIT suggests that the use of ChatGPT leads to users’ brain scans exhibiting “weaker neural connectivity and under-engagement of alpha and beta networks”; while the study has yet to undergo peer review, if the same results apply to AI tools for music learning—an area which hasn’t been studied as yet—then such tools may actually come to put young musicians at a disadvantage. We simply can’t be sure of the long term effects of such radical, emergent technologies, and there may be hidden costs alongside the more immediately tangible benefits.

In an interview with Devin Townsend, Rudess talks about AI as simply the next tool for musicians and posits that “how you use it is up to you as a person.” But the tool he describes sounds an awful lot like cheating: 

My goal is to give the machines information about who I am so we can start to get to a point where you’re at home and you’re working on a song and you play something and, y’know, like measure 14 to 18 you can be like, “I don’t know I’m having a bad day or whatever just give me something based on my style.” And to me that’s like the next level tool.

Rudess’ believes that a sufficiently well-trained neural network could compose something in your style and that you could then look at what the AI gives you for those measures and choose to reject it or adapt it. That in and of itself isn’t an inherently unethical use of such technology, but Rudess’ “how you use it is up to you” absolves him of considering the potential for people to use such technologies to create terabytes of music trained on the work of others and then dishonestly sell it to the market at large. Although Rudess’ promotion of these companies seems to be in good faith, the slightly obsessive preoccupation of a technophilic boomer, he nevertheless seems blinkered to the reality that not everyone utilising these technologies will be acting responsibly and that AI contains massive potential for fraudulence.  

Rudess isn’t the only influential figure in music to pivot towards tech. Rick Rubin, the music producer/guru, a man proudly untrained in music playing, theory and producing, has taken his immunity to learning things and produced a digital book about AI: The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding. By his own admission, Rubin knows as much about coding as he does about music production. In fact, the genesis of the book is that Rubin heard the phrase ‘vibe coding.’ which he didn’t understand, and then kept seeing a meme of himself associated with it. “Based on” Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching and “adapted” by Rick Rubin, the “book” is a lot of aphoristic mumbo-jumbo on the topic of “vibe coding”—i.e. writing prompts into AI tools to do your coding for you⁸—and illustrated with graphics generated by Claude AI which the reader can modify, if they’re so inclined.

In an interview on The Ben & Marc Show⁹ (that’s Marc Andreessen of the aforementioned Techno-Optimist Manifesto and his venture capitalist partner Ben Horowitz), Rubin discusses various aspects of AI in the music industry. He describes AI as just “another tool in the artist’s arsenal”. He says the backlash against AI in art is because “the reason we go to an artist… is for their point of view” but we mistakenly believe that AI art is showing an AI’s point of view. In a moment of very muddled reasoning he states that “the AI doesn’t have a point of view. The AI’s point of view is what you tell it the point of view is to be.” But as we’ve seen, this isn’t true. If art is an accumulation of choices by the artist then handing over the bulk of those choices to a machine trained on the art of others isn’t a creative act at all. It’s true that AI doesn’t have a point of view, but the product it produces based on your prompts isn’t your point of view either; at best, it’s a funhouse mirror reflection of your point of view—a distorted aberration. 

Rubin argues that AI in music is a further democratisation of the artistic process; just as the simplicity of punk rock before it allowed anyone with a message to convey it via music, so “vibe coding” is a democratisation of coding. Again, Rubin gets muddled here:

It can make animation that looks like your favourite cartoon and so then you see a million people doing that. That’s one idea, I want to see all the things it could do, to understand what’s possible, instead of just “I’m going to get it to do the same thing that everyone else is getting it to do.”

Rubin wants to see what the people who can “push the boundaries” can do with this technology. And doubtlessly, there are creative, talented people out there who will likely be able to push what generative AI can do to a higher level; one could become skilled at being a prompt generator, but that wouldn’t make them an artist. Again, Rubin doesn’t have a solid foundation on what AI is or that the way it produces anything; he doesn’t understand that all the outputs are tantamount to theft of existing art, including all the albums he’s ever worked on. When he says he’s “interested in what AI really can know…based on what is and not what we tell it we think it is”, he once again shows that he doesn’t understand that this isn’t an intelligent machine, it doesn’t know anything, it can’t create, and everything it makes is a regurgitation of content originally rendered by humans. 

It’s easy to dismiss Rubin’s views on this topic as the ravings of a spiritual man whose curiosity outweighs his inclination to actually conduct research, but he’s a heavy-hitter in the creative world, and his legitimisation of an ethically dubious technology without questioning the potential harms is a problem. The average user of these LLMs and AI-based programmes isn’t interrogating the industry they emanated from, the aims of the libertarian-inclined tech capitalists who own them, or the potentials for harm that come with the technology. Trusted industry figures like Rubin and Rudess allow the pushers of these technologies to maintain a veneer of respectability, as well as plausible deniability against the various issues that come with them.

Closer to prog, another icon who’s dabbled with AI is Steven Wilson. In December 2024, Wilson released a novelty Christmas track called “December Skies”. All the instruments, the vocals, and the composition itself are real human musicianship; only the lyrics were generated via ChatGPT prompts to give him lyrics in the style of himself. Wilson explained: 

It produced a lot, 99 percent of which was pretty awful. It was very generic, very clichéd, very banal, but about one percent it generated I could use. So it was really a question of me going through and picking out, “That’s a good line. That’s shit, that’s shit, that’s shit, that’s shit, that’s shit. Oh, that’s a good line,” and ending up with something that I thought was usable.

Ultimately, Wilson said he wasn’t interested in AI because it produces quite generic results and he was more interested in surprising ideas, adding that AI lacked that human sense of soul: “It’s kind of a reflection of a human being to lots of other human beings and seeing if those other human beings recognize themselves in that mirror.” AI can, at best, only fake that, much as Chiang said. But Wilson recognised that AI is here to stay and it could be a useful tool. After all, he argues:

For the last twenty-five years we’ve had software that can tune a singer that can’t sing in tune (like me). We’ve had software that can make a drummer that can’t play very well in time make them sound in time. We’ve had software that can emulate orchestras going back to the Mellotron. Since the beginning of electricity musicians have had tools that have helped them to make their music sound more polished and more impressive.

Wilson’s analysis seems more cautious than the AI enthusiasts like Rudess, but he still comes to the same point: this is just the next weapon in the arsenal. However, there’s a difference between those like Rudess who want to emphasise the potential utility AI might have for augmenting the composing experience of talented musicians like himself, and those who have no musical talent of their own and just want to cash in by generating soulless slop. Opposition to AI isn’t steeped in a technological consideration so much as it’s motivated by concerns of integrity. Understandably, most people have more respect for artists who have honed their craft over years of dedicated practice, who create without AI and who support fellow artists. Just as the AI album art used by bands often receives a backlash from fans, so musicians who make extensive use of AI will likely be called out for it, and it can make a difference—under pressure from fans who disliked his incessant promotion of AI, Rudess recently made new social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram which would silo the AI content to only those interested in following it. That may be a small concession to the Luddites, but it’s a minor victory nonetheless for prog’s top AI spokesman to recognise the unpopularity of his new obsession.

Fighting Back Against RoboSlop

What we are witnessing from the AI boosters is not much short of a crusade… They are waging a holy war to destroy every threat of their vision of the future, which involves all creative work being wholly owned by a handful of billionaires licensing access to chatbots [and] to media conglomerates to spit up content generated as a result of this. Their foot soldiers are those with petty grievances against artists—people who can create things that they simply cannot—and those who reflexively lean in towards whatever grifters of the day say is the best way to make cash quick.

– Robert Evans

What we have to realise is this is a systemic issue. While the true believers like Rudess and Rubin claim that this is merely a new tool for musicians to use, the reality is that an entire industrial edifice exists beyond the bedroom artist generating an image via DALL-E for his second-rate instrudjental album. An evangelistic fervour has captured Big Tech leading the industry towards a profoundly libertarian desire to burn down all regulation in order to ensure maximal profit from the sum total of human culture through an act of wide-scale thievery. The space for AI that has opened up in the digital sphere appeals to a pre-existing tendency to indulge in fantastical views of how the world work, one which has massive and terrible implications for our politics, for the environment, and for the concept of truth itself. 

We still don’t know the long-term harm of these technologies. Much has been written on the immense environmental impact of AI servers, with projections that they will be drawing on four to six times more freshwater annually than the entire population of Denmark uses in a year, and that AI data centres in Ireland may account for up to 35% of the nation’s total electricity output in order to maintain operation by 2026. As mentioned earlier, a preliminary study out of MIT showed weaker activity in brain scans of ChatGPT users, and another showed “indicators of addiction” including “withdrawal symptoms” when users were cut off from the chatbot. Reports of chatbot use causing or exacerbating mental health issues, including messiah complexes, paranoid delusions, and even leading to suicide have begun to make headlines—the Turing test now seems less like a measure of the humanness of artificial intelligence and more like a measure of the credulity of the human interlocutor. AI content on social media platforms can have marked political impacts, such as the satirical AI video of a Trump/Netanyahu conquered Gaza which was shared by the President, and disingenuous actors have begun to attempt to discredit their political enemies with AI generated content. It’s hard not to conclude that we’re living in a deeply stupid time¹⁰. In the artistic sphere, AI may be less popular than it is among essay-averse students, people in the midst of mid-life crises, and world leaders, but that doesn’t mean it’s going away. However, some people are coming up with tools to fight back. 

Programmers at the University of Chicago have developed the software tools Glaze and Nightshade, which scramble the AI’s ability to interpret images. Specifically, Nightshade “turns any image into a data sample that is unsuitable for model training” by effectively “poisoning” the images so that neural networks that attempt to read them hallucinate rather than reading them accurately. Similarly, independent musician Benn Jordan has pioneered a software called Poisonify which he claims works like Glaze and Nightshade but for music; his claims seem a little wild, and the degree to which this is a genuine technology is unclear, but it nevertheless shows that people are fighting back. Of course, technology is an arms race, and when the weapons of war are revealed, defence mechanisms are developed in parallel; forums like the r/DefendingAIArt subreddit monitor the tactics being used against their hallowed generative AI software.

These tools have their limits and they won’t be able to stop generative AI forever. The greatest tool against feckless billionaires is, as ever, the law. Regulation and restriction of the companies that train their AIs on the sum total of human knowledge with total disregard for ethics could and should be a significant priority. For one thing, if it destroys their derangedly large investments that will give us all some schadenfreude to take solace in, but the main aim is to protect. While the UK has held a consultation on AI and Copyright which seeks to support “rights holder’s control of their content and ability to be remunerated for its use” as well as ways of opting out of being used for training AI models, the consultation also sought to support “the development of world-leading AI models in the UK by ensuring wide and lawful access to high-quality data” which seems like a vested interest. 

Nevertheless, work like this and the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act at least show some recognition of the problems that have emerged from the rapid and unencumbered rollout of AI, as well as an awareness that there is a need to safeguard against its more immediate harms. When it comes to AI music, major record labels Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony have pursued lawsuits against AI companies Udio and Suno. As Robert Stringer, CEO of Sony Music says: 

There will be artists, probably there will be young people sitting in bedrooms today, who will end up making the music of tomorrow through AI. But if they use existing content to blend something into something magical, then those original creators have to be fairly compensated. And I think that’s where we are at the moment.

Such lawsuits will likely end in licensing agreements rather than the wholescale crushing of corporate models predicated on theft. While such a conclusion wouldn’t completely address the underlying ethical issues, some regulation on AI companies and recompense for exploited artists is certainly a step in the right direction.

But perhaps the most promising development in war of AI comes from the headquarters of the companies developing, funding and marketing it. The industry has become increasingly reticent to share financial data and user numbers in the wake of its revolutionary tech coup, and for good reason. OpenAI, by far the most successful of the AI start-ups and the parent of both ChatGPT and DALL-E image generation software, lost $5 billion in 2024, but projected potential revenues of $11.6 billion for 2025; revenues, it should be emphasised, are not profits. AI is extraordinarily expensive to run, and the industry runs at a loss because it simply isn’t being adopted at the necessary scale to make money: OpenAI claims 1.5 billion active monthly users, of whom 15.5 million are paying subscribers, or 0.96%; other estimates suggest the platform actually has more like 600 million active monthly users, which still puts paying customers at an abysmal 2.58%. For a technology that claims to be revolutionary and indispensable, these numbers are catastrophic.

Meanwhile, as AI products are forced on the workplace, many employees refuse to cooperate. A survey by the generative AI platform Writer, found that “31% of employees admit to ‘sabotaging’ their company’s AI strategy by refusing to adopt AI tools and applications”, two-thirds of company executives said adopting generative AI had caused “tension and division” in their companies. People simply don’t like AI, they aren’t adopting it at the scale the industry expected despite enormous investments and marketing efforts; if this trajectory continues, the AI bubble will pop and cause immense damage to the tech sector. Worse still, the utility of AI over time may well degrade rather than improve. As the internet becomes flooded with AI content, LLMs will begin to use that AI content to train themselves, and this leads to what’s known as model collapse. AI needs an immense quantity of data in order to improve itself, more than we’ve ever generated. When an LLM cannibalises too much AI content, it will “compound its own errors, forget certain words and artifacts that are less present in its training, and eventually cave in on itself.” Some researchers have dubbed this Habsburg AI, referring to the inbreeding and decline of the European royal dynasty.

While there are some promising moves towards regulation that aim to curtail the most extreme excesses of generative AI and those invested in it, and the sector itself seems to be teetering upon the precipice of failure, it’s down to us as consumers to be informed, aware, and ethical in our choices. We can politely tell our favourite artists that we would like them to avoid using AI content and alert them to the harms therein; we can tell them that we won’t financially support them if they insist on using a technology that hinges upon theft; and we can choose to boycott streaming services that take a relaxed line on AI content or even actively promote it. Consumer choice might not change the world, but it will yield some small victories and leave our consciences clean.

The world of AI is a strange new frontier for digital content creators, and one can’t blame people for being curious to experiment. However, the myriad ethical issues, from copyright theft to significant exacerbation of climate change, as well as the single-minded domination of an unregulated and errant tech sector, show that the technology as a whole is significantly flawed. Procedurally generating AI album covers may seem a harmless act, but it tacitly supports a deeply immoral industry gambit predicated on an act of wide-scale data thievery that has a surprising range of deeply worrying externalities. If we love music, we must do what we can to defend it from such threats, and though AI may have a limited place within the future of music composition, it behooves us to resist so-called “AI art” and “AI music” as much as we can. So keep away from tech bros, listen to AAI not AI, and make art the good old-fashioned way: with Pro Tools. 

Footnotes:

1. Thall. If you think djent isn’t a genre, boy are you gonna be pissed I said thall is a subgenre. ︎
2. Syme also caught flack for seemingly reusing a piece of art from Orion’s album booklet for Parasomnia’s, which, as I said, he may have used AI for anyway. ︎
3.  The next release, Djentlemen of Groove, opted for a group of topless women standing around a muscular Latino man in leather shorts and yielded D1G1T4L RU1N a single download. Did the user buy the album because of the sexy AI art, or for such classic hits as “Don’t Cum”, “I’m Gonna Cum”, and “Gawk Gawk 9000”? We may never know.  ︎
4. When I first came across the story, they had a mere 300,000 monthly listeners, but the resulting media attention has massively boosted them. ︎
5. It’s best to assume that everything about this piece is beholden to the rule of “at the time of writing.” This article has been a nightmare because the situation is so fluid and evolving. Things keep happening.  ︎
6.  An Instagram page for The Velvet Sundown was created after the band went viral, populated with obviously AI images, naturally. ︎
7. The full document’s worth a read. It’s a wild ride through the mind of a guy who read a lot of sci-fi and didn’t understand it, and a lot of Ayn Rand and, tragically, did understand it. ︎
8. Vibe coding has nothing to do with music and Rubin doesn’t seem to understand that because, y’know, he doesn’t do research. ︎
9. I link this for being true to my sources, but for the good of your own health, don’t watch this, it’s interminable nonsense. ︎
10.  I have to maintain some sense of objectivity, so I can’t really say that I think every tech CEO should be on trial in The Hague, but it’s a belief that writing this essay has driven me towards. ︎

The post The Machine Starts: Progressive Music, AI Slop, and the Fight for Artistic Expression appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Andy

Selections:

1. Misericorde (Part 1), Ne Obliviscarius
2. Misericorde (Part 2), Ne Obliviscarius
3. The Cambrian Explosion, The Ocean
4. Harbingers, Fires In The Distance
5. Polygon, Galya Bisengalieva
6. From the Start, Laufey
7. Enduring the Snow Drought, Panopticon
8. Metacognitive, Einar Solberg
9. Throne of the Lunar Soul, Valdrin
10. The Revelation, Stortregn

Christopher

Selections:

1. Spore, Omnerod
2. Departure, Sermon
3. Threnody to a Dying Star, Rannoch
4. Through the Sands of Time, Temic
5. Out of Sight, Ions
6. Kapitel I – Freiheit, Finsterforst
7. Esoterica, Kyros
8. Staircase, Steven Wilson
9. The Night Inside, Pressure Points
10. Thick Skull, Paramore

If you want your bones rattled, Sermon’s “Departure” is where it’s at; Him, the anonymous vocalist gives his most bracing vocal performance amidst thick riffs, a stunning lead motif, and the crushing drum performance of James Stewart. Meanwhile, Pressure Points delivered an Amorphis-esque prog bop with “The Night Inside”, catchy yet Opethian with a fantastic climax. Finsterforst’s “Kapitel I – Freiheit” brings the epic: glistening symphonics, thunderous vocals, and beautiful folk-inspired sections over the most epic German blackened progressive folk metal you’ll hear. But if you want even more epic than that, Rannoch’s “Threnody to a Dying Star” is seventeen minutes of the coolest progressive death metal this year

It was a great year for electro-prog: Temic’s sublime debut Terror Management Theory centred the sound design and keys of Diego Tejeida, and the blend of elements reaches its zenith on “Through the Sands of Time” with a drop dead gorgeous solo section and catchy chorus. Ions’ synthy djent proved a refreshing sound, too, and those swollen vocal harmonies on the chorus of “Out of Sight” made it the winning pick from Counterintuitive, an album replete with bangers. Prog legend Steven Wilson returned with his most electronica influenced solo work yet, and “Staircase” is a beautiful sojourn through a variety of soundscapes, prog to its core. We’re just getting poppier here, huh? I may as well mention Paramore then, “Thick Skull” was the highlight on the unexpectedly mature and melodic This is Why. 2024 will continue the electro-prog trend: “Esoterica” from Kyros’ forthcoming album Mannequin, a sublime fusion of lascivious synth pop and maximalist prog rock, like if Haken and Gunship collaborated, was easily the best single this year heralding an incredible album to come.

But the song of the year has to go to “Spore” from my favourite album of this year, The Amensal Rise. Omnerod start with serene vocals and eerie harmonica, journey through twelve minutes of pummelling riffs, godly vocal performances and earth-shattering solos, easily making for this year’s most astonishing track on an album of unhinged Devin-esque prog death.

Cooper

Selections:

1. pillar of salt (feat. dylan walker & iRis.EXE), The Acacia Strain
2. Aphelion, The World Is Quiet Here
3. Prof. Arronax’ Descent into the Vast Oceans (Feat Ultha), Ahab
4. Chrysopoeia (The Archaeology of the Dawn), Horrendous
5. The Bad Luck That Saved You From Worse Luck, 夢遊病者

Doug

Selections:

1. Grey, Enoch Root
2. Back, Yet Forward, Nospūn
3. Sempiternal Beings, Haken
4. …Of Ruins, Course of Fate
5. True Friendship, Ions
6. Desert Eagle, Bend the Future
7. Bear the Weight, Exploring Birdsong
8. A Cosmic Laughter, Karma Rassa
9. Prophecy, The Resonance Project
10. Detonator Gauntlet, East Of The Wall

2023 was a great year for debut concept albums. Between Enoch Root’s Delusion and Nospūn’s Opus, those of us yearning for more Metropolis imitators – or more favorably, companions and inheritors – have spent the year with much to chew on. Of course I have to throw in a track from Haken as well – although not within the normal underground purview of this site, it would be unfair not to mention alongside these other bands who have drawn so much inspiration from them. Plus, if you’ll allow me a hot take, it might be their best song in roughly a decade. Two sophomore album picks from Course of Fate and Ions round out my batch of traditional prog offerings before we dive into the more arcane.

In both Bend the Future and Exploring Birdsong we explore bits of the eclectic influences which inevitably find their way into prog. The former collect everything from jazz to post-rock, featuring saxophone wailing away atop a sparse backing of percussion and smoothed-out rhythm guitar. With the latter’s guitarless approach, they echo that jazz influence again, but also feelings of pop singer-songwriter aesthetics, settling into a cheery and upbeat mood that’s not especially common among progressive music.

I’ll round out the list with a bit of a grab bag. Taking an especially jazz-forward stand on djent, The Resonance Project mix mystery with thrills, simultaneously developing their wind-instrument-heavy melody lines alongside crunchy, intense rhythm guitar more befitting expectations of the genre. Meanwhile, both Karma Rassa and East Of The Wall jointly show off post- and alternative metal sensibilities, ramping up the distortion and haze without shying away from the driving, emotional moments that provide a strong core for their music.

Sam

Selections:

1. 1st Movement – Animabilis, Günter Werno
2. Banana Split, Pleasures
3. Currents: Severance, Vedalia
4. Neptunian (As Trident Strikes the Ice), Winterhorde
5. Bard of the Hell-Bent Ages, Oak Pantheon
6. Interference, Anubis Gate
7. Towers of Gold, Sacred Outcry
8. Lumen, Nebulae Come Sweet
9. In The Mood For Love, Ali
10. Congelia, Enslaved

Will

Selections:

1. Austerity, Katatonia
2. The Scavenger, Enoch Root
3. Instill, Humanity’s Last Breath
4. Poisoned and Shadowmad, Crawl
5. Gila Monster, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
6. Path of Forlorn, Deposed King

Having been a bit unplugged from the Subway this year, my list is both short and maybe more mainstream than my colleagues. I’ve built my (albeit short) list by going back through my most played songs on Spotify over the last year – on the understanding that a great song is one that demands to be listened to on repeat. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

• Alkaloid
• Fires in the Distance
• Galya Bisenglieva
• Stortregn
• Omnerod
• Sermon
• Ronnoch
• Temic
• Ions
• Finsterforst
• Pressure Points
• The World Is Quiet Here
• Horrendous
• 夢遊病者
• Enoch Root
• Nospūn
• Course of Fate
• Bend the Future
• Exploring Birdsong
• Karma Rassa
• The Resonance Project
• East of the Wall
• Günter Werno
• Pleasures
• Vedalia
• Winterhorde
• Oak Pantheon
• Anubis Gate
• Sacred Outcry
• Nebulae Come Sweet

The post Playlist – Top Songs of 2023 appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Across cultures and faiths, winter solstice celebrations are often to do with about driving away the approaching darkness – creating warmth and light and fun during the darkest, coldest and most desolate time of year. Our playlist is a Prog-infused tribute to this tradition: The first half representing the dark desolation of winter and the second representing that warmth and light we create to drive that darkness away.

Whether you want some extra music to spice up your parties, or if you’re just sick of the usual Christmas song pop fare, we hope you find something to enjoy these winter months here.

Christopher

I’m gonna be repping a lot of Mile Marker Zero here because they’ve released four covers of Christmas songs over the years, each in the style of a different legendary prog group. First up “Winter Wonderland” in the style of classic Genesis: lots of piano, acoustic guitar and of course, noodly synth solos, plus percussive Christmassy clapping. After that, go for a “Sleigh Ride” in the style of Rush which is replete with a “Tom Sawyer”-esque opening, hard rock riffs, that iconic keyboard sound and a sense of infectious groove. They also dropped a cover of “Please Come Home for Christmas” in the style of Queen as we were putting together this playlist, and yes, it’s as theatrical as you’d imagine.

However, Mile Marker Zero’s greatest gift is “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in the style of Opeth. The instant that Dave Alley diminishes “year” in classic Akerfeldtian fashion, you know you’re in for a ride. Nailing all the quirks of Opeth—the haunting organ, complex lead guitar parts, eerie harmonies, and nasty riffs—it’s a fantastic homage and a legit Christmas song so the family can’t complain, even if they don’t like the slightly evil Swedish vibe.

Let’s not forget a classic while we’re here: Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas” is a staple of Christmas CD collections, albeit lower down on the tracklist after the Mariah Carey and Slade contributions. The ELP and King Crimson singer released this scathing indictment of the commercialisation of Christmas in 1975 and while it’s not prog per se, the general influence of the genre remains, from the complex acoustic intro (played on a 12-string) to the lifting of a melody from Prokofiev to the eschewing of verse/chorus structure to the one-hundred-piece orchestra that delivers a crescendous finale. Remember Greg Lake isn’t just for your throwback prog listening, he’s also for Christmas.

Doug

As sorry as I am to say it, I’m an uncreative hack, and finding clever songs for this playlist was much too great a task for me, so instead here are a handful of songs very explicitly about winter and/or cold things. As I lack deep knowledge of random Christmas song metal covers or concept albums that take place around the winter holidays, from me instead you get two separate tracks effectively titled just “Winter” (and a couple others to go with them).

The first of these is Karma Rassa’s “Zima” (you’ll never guess what that translates to), starting off with thematically appropriate sound effects of footsteps in the snow, evoking the sparse desolation of the winter months even before the plaintive guitar and muted all-Russian vocals kick in. Contrast with “Snowbound,” Anubis Gate’s lively but frosty opener from their best album to date, showing a different but equally hostile side of the season in their crisp, clean execution.

On a slightly different tack, enhance your “Cold December Night” with this spooky track from Vanden Plas (the second of these bands whom I still can’t believe aren’t popular enough to escape our very limited standards of “underground”), showing that they can still bring it after all these years. And lastly we have Cydemind’s cover from Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons “Winter” violin concerto, a piece which my parents put on every winter during the first snow of the year and so carries strong personal associations for me. I picked this more because it’s fun than because it’s great; in spite of my great love for last year’s The Descent, Cydemind don’t show nearly so much polish in their earlier recordings, but the piece lends itself well to metallification, and with a violinist already at hand, there are few better bands to tackle it than they.

Will

It’s been awhile!

Having been outside the exciting world of underground prog for a little while, I’ve felt somewhat limited in what I could bring to this playlist beyond facilitating and organizing. However, I did choose a few things to compliment my more talented colleagues.

I simply can’t get into winter without listening to Opeth‘s masterpiece Blackwater Park – with “The Leper Affinity’s” opening thesis statement ‘We enter winter once again’. On the nose? Yes. Awesome nonetheless? Heck yes.

Seeing my role as supporting Doug and Chris, I’ve tried to set music to offset and compliment their picks – for Christopher’s choices of classic Christmas songs reimagined in the style of prog bands, I chose classic, dark winter-y tracks from Opeth, Insomnium, and Uneven Structure. To compliment Doug’s busy, warm power metal infused choices, I preceded them with more minimalist stylings of Agalloch, Kauan, and Secret Garden. And for good measure added some warming tracks from Jethro Tull and Horslips.

I was sorely tempted to add “Winter’s Ghost” by Panoptikon but couldn’t justify a 20-minute behemoth of a song in this playlist. So, reader, please accept this as a bonus track.

Sam

Hello it’s me, coming in last minute. Winter to me has always been a time of introspection and melancholy. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of going on a stroll in nature under the blue skies of the winter sun. The glowing cheeks, the cold air, the fuzzy hormones in your underbelly… Nature is sleeping, giving all space to turn inwards as you reflect upon the world in its most stripped down, essential form. My dad passed away around this time last year, meaning my songs will be on the sadder end of the spectrum.

My first three submissions are meant to reflect this feeling. Subsignal have written many a song about winter, but the most fitting I find is “Some Kind of Drowning,” an incredibly poignant piano duet featuring Marjana Semkina from Iamthemorning about a loved one passing. On the more hopeful side, I went with “Thin Air” from Anathema to also reflect the light, uplifting aspects of winter and the love we feel for those close to us. And though winter is a time of death, it is also a time of rebirth, which is why my third song is “Departure” by Evergrey, my favorite tune in 2023. Though it’s about the end of a relationship, the tone is hopeful and optimistic about the future: “It’s not about the breaking, but the rising with an aim.”

To continue the upbeat trend, I wanted a couple of songs which were less musically sad. “Lady of Winter” by Crimson Glory is an early prog/power metal classic tune with a phenomenal sing-along chorus, “Daily View” by Maestrick adopted all your Christmas commercials into a goofy prog-power song, and “Cold Runs the River” by Borknagar is a majestic winter storm. And of course, no winter prog playlist can go without Enslaved and their introspective songwriting. I opted for “Ground” for its godly Floydian solo and comfy atmosphere. Finally, I wanted something heavier, for which I took the moody “Étoc” by Subway-darlings Hands of Despair. Happy holidays all!

• Negură Bunget
• Karma Rassa
• Maestrick

The post Playlist – Festive Winter Prog appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

As we enter winter once again, the writers of The Progressive Subway have come together in conjuring a playlist in recognition of the legendary heritage of Opeth. Make no mistake, this playlist is not a requiem, or a funeral portrait (the band is still going strong, thank you very much). But it’s a fair judgment that Opeth has been incredibly influential to music fans and musicians alike, forming a large part of the windowpane into heavy progressive metal for many and it is this deliverance that we examine today. 

In the late nineties/early noughties, Opeth bottled lightning with a distinctive blend of melodic death metal, prog rock, inspired writing and excellent musicianship to create some incredibly compelling, atmospheric albums which led them to becoming nigh on iconic in alternative music circles. Despite this, constant debate has surrounded Opeth‘s later musical direction towards a distinctively lighter sound: For some this has been an eternal soul torture, but nectar to the ears of others, allowing Opeth to reach a wider audience with differing musical sensibilities.

“Opeth-worship” bands quickly followed as a whole generation of music lovers and bedroom-shredders strangled the necks of their guitars attempting to produce the bar chords from ‘The Drapery Falls’. We on this blog have sometimes been somewhat critical of bands that lean too heavily on their Opeth influences as opposed to producing their own musical ideas. But for this playlist, we’ll let that all go. It’s officially open Opeth-worship season on the site.

We are focusing our celebration of Opeth on smaller bands, the many heirs apparent to Opeth‘s legacy: the master’s apprentices, if you will. Writers Christopher, Doug and Zach have collected sounds from the prog underground that show their Opeth influences like a face in the snow. that carry the Opeth torch onto the next generation and into the frost of winter.

As always, you can scroll down to read our writers’ rationale for their choices and check out links for bands that the Blog has reviewed in the past.

Christopher

Selections: Anciients, Obsidian Tide, Luna’s Call, Vinsta, The Reticent, Wilderun

Anciients have just announced that they’re going into the studio to record album number three, thank god. They’re one of the most promising Opeth-inspired bands out there, fusing the inimitable Blackwater Park era sound with a sludgier vibe reminiscent of Mastodon and The Ocean. Y’know who else needs to get back in the studio? Obsidian Tide. Their debut album Pillars of Creation demonstrated a more circuitous take on the Opeth sound, with the Phrygian elements of their native Israel, and a quiet eye towards experimentation that bodes well for future releases.

There are two questions that lurk around our minds in those quiet moments when little else occupies us: as sleep takes over our bodies, as our loved ones turn away, as the tide pulls away from the shore… The first is: what if Opeth had continued on the prog death path? The answer is Luna’s Call, an incredible evocation of Opeth’s classic sound with something more energetic driving it. And the second question is: what if Opeth were Bavarian and they yodled? The answer to that question is Vinsta. 

The Reticent made the best album I will never listen to again. The Oubliette is an emotional nightmare of a concept album about dementia painted on an Opethian canvas that hits all the high points: incredible melodies, brutal death metal, impeccable storytelling. This is the only album to have ever made me truly weep and want to scream, and it did both at the same time at one point. And yet there are even better bands out there. Imagine if Opeth accompanied themselves with epic orchestration and leaned into a more dynamic sound. That’s Wilderun, and at the risk of being controversial, Wilderun are even better than the most iconic band in progressive metal. Come and flame me. 

Doug

Selections: Sisare, Hillward, Echoes and Signals

As the Subway’s latest resident prog rocker, it apparently falls to me to cover Opeth’s late-period heavy progressive rock output. Deep, deep down beneath the upper strata of artists often likened to Opeth’s post-Watershed style – your Anathemas, your Porcupine Trees, your Soens – lies an even deeper well of hidden gems who likewise ply their uncrunchy guitars and their melancholy, introspective, atmospheric lyrics in obeisance to the dark god Opeth.

Sisare bring a mostly uncomplicated style to the table, though their composition still bespeaks a wealth of depth and complexity. Featuring healthy layers of Soen-esque lightly distorted guitars, lively bass, mournful vocals, and unassuming but tightly plotted percussion, Sisare’s second and far more noteworthy album Leaving the Land triumphs in its simple yet effective execution.

Hillward opt for a more cinematic approach, featuring greater presence of keyboards and acoustic guitar, somewhat reminiscent of Riverside. Layering these elements on top of the shared foundation of heavy prog rock, the band have refined this formula across their three releases, culminating in 2021’s Alternate Timelines.
The latest addition to this list, Echoes and Signals, have only more recently settled into their Opethian style after a gradual metamorphosis of sorts through a few varieties of alternative rock and metal. Their 2021 album Mercurial further incorporates a light, ethereal haze that raises the sense of melancholy to its limits. “Broken Machine” is the keystone of this album, an emotional and moving lament concerning the frailty of the human condition.

Will

Selections: Hands of Despair, Piah Mater, Athela,

True story: Opeth was my gateway into heavier music with harsher vocals. Coming from a background in classic rock, early metal bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple with a sprinkling of 90’s and 00’s indie, bands that made use of screams and growls felt somewhat inaccessible to me. I wanted to enjoy it but felt like I just couldn’t get a good handhold on it. “The Drapery Falls” changed that for me. The writing on that track, starting with an acoustic driven, deeply atmospheric melody before building into heavier sounds and feeding in Åkerfeldt’s death growls with such subtlety gave me an in. Everything clicked in my teenage mind and the rest is history. In honour of this, I chose “Amendment” from Athela‘s three track EP, this track does a good job of mimicking this progression from piano to forte, from haunting atmosphere to growling melo-death.

Piah Mater, once described on this site as being the perfect band for people who want to live an alternate reality where Åkerfeldt never stopped growling, is straight up pure black-tar Opeth-worship. From pacing, guitar tones, solos, vocals, even the way finger movement on a guitar strings during a chord transition gets picked up on the recordings in acoustic sections are all deeply reminiscent of Opeth‘s style. No playlist worshipping the Swedish giants would be complete without including them.

Hand of Despair, like many progressive death metal bands, is clearly saturated in Opeth influence. But, unlike Piah Mater, the Quebeqois band make it their own, assimilating it into a sound all their own. 12-minute epic “Doppelganger” manages to feel fresh while still clearly having one food in their metal heritage.

Zach

Selections: Disillusion, Ne Obliviscaris, Dessiderium

What’s the secret to my dashing good looks and extra strong muscles despite the fact I’m actually over 10,000 years old? Well, I’m glad you asked. It’s simple really. I go to the gym 36 times a day, do my rigorous skincare routine thrice and I listen to Opeth every day. That last part probably isn’t a joke. Blackwater Park, in my humble opinion, is the best thing to happen to music since the invention of prog, and I consider the ‘peth in their prime to be the greatest band to ever walk this earth. No other band has the riffs and vocal prowess that Mikey Anklefeet brings to the table. So, why so little picks? Well, one, I wanted to let all the other proglings have their say. Two, I literally pick an FFO for Opeth every playlist. 

We start off with Ne Obliviscaris. If you’re a self-professed Opeth fan and you haven’t heard them, there are bigger problems in your life that I need you to sort out pronto. They resemble the Morningrise-era if they’d kept that jazzy bass and added a violinist to the lineup. Seriously, these guys are stupid talented and one of the best torchbearers of the progressive death metal sound. This was a hard choice, but I decided to choose ‘Forget Not’, probably one of the best metal songs ever written, for its insane use of the 12 minutes it has you captive. Seriously, this song feels like it’s 5 minutes long. 

Then we have our newly uncovered Lost in Time pick, Disillusion. A band with one of the strongest debuts in existence, who combine Opethian songwriting strategies with a mid 2000s melodeath aggressive edge. ‘Back to Times of Splendor’ the titular track of their debut, is the best example of their sound. The violin-driven riff in the beginning and that triumphant chorus get my blood pumping every single time. 

Lastly, we have the Zach-approved darling of the blog, Dessiderium. You could pick a good chunk of the playlists I’ve participated in, and chance is you’ll find a writeup about Alex Haddad’s one man masterclass of progressive death metal. But I’ll remind you again. Aria is one of the greatest albums ever made and ‘Pale’ has one of the coolest riffs you’ll ever find in a prog-death song. A swirling, dreamlike masterpiece that’s sure to enamour those who want lengthy, dynamic compositions. 

• Hands of Despair (included in 2018’s AOTY posts)
• Piah Mater
• Dessiderium
• Disillusion (Coming soon!)

The post Playlist – FFO Opeth (or, A Dirge for November) appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

There are a lot of great covers in the mainstream of progressive music that we could point to, Opeth‘s grungy “Circle of The Tyrants“, Mastodon‘s poignant “Stairway to Heaven“. Our writers have been searching for unique and interesting covers from smaller progressive bands to check-out.

Christopher

Selections: Cheeto’s Magazine, Omnerod, Novena, Che Aimee Dorval, Mile Marker Zero

I love a cover that takes a song and goes somewhere weird and wild with it. To that effect, my first pick is Spain’s nutty prog rock professors Cheeto’s Magazine and their off-the-wall take on “Basket Case” by Green Day. Zany synths, wacky vocals and noodling lead licks jostle together like oversugared children in a bouncy castle after an ill-advised cocktail of junk food, infusing the punk classic with cartoonish jazz flavours better suited to a drug-inspired children’s breakfast television show.

You want heavier? I’ll give you heavier: Omnerod’s brutal take on the experimental electronica track “You Make Me Feel” by Archive. This Belgian ensemble faithfully emulate the melodies and sensibility of the original, an eerie and noisy love song, but make it a thousand tons heftier, with agonised harshes, dissonant riffs, and crazed sax licks courtesy of the ever-brilliant Jørgen Munkeby. 

When Ross Jennings isn’t focused on Haken or releasing solo albums, he’s fronting the deeply underrated Novena, who brought us a brilliant cover of Billie Eilish’s “Bury A Friend”. It’s actually Gareth Mason who takes on lead vocal duties on this one, and despite fronting the brutal Slice the Cake he manages to maintain the gentle sensuality of the original. Starting off faithful to Eilish’s vision, Novena slowly layer on the heavier prog elements, including some nasty piano scrapes and melodic guitar harmonies. 

The Yuletide season isn’t too far away now and so I thought I’d prepare you for the season of uninspired music with some prog Christmas covers. Connecticut neo-proggers Mile Marker Zero have released two Christmas covers in the style of other bands. And so I present to you their take on “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in the style of Watershed-era Opeth—which you know is going to be a sublimely observed pastiche from the moment the singer gives an eerie Akerfeldtian diminishment to the very first vocal line—AND a Genesis inspired version of “Winter Wonderland”, which ably captures the sound of those icons. 

Finally, longtime Devin Townsend collaborator Ché Aimee Dorval constitutes an inversion on the formula, having taken a couple of prog staples and converted them to her own bluesy/folky vibe. She took The Mars Volta’s “The Widow” gave it an agonised blues rock twang, and intensified its emotional weight by dint of her absolutely jaw-dropping singing. She also transformed Strapping Young Lad’s intense rager “Almost Again” into a jaunty folk bop (which unfortunately isn’t on Spotify, but it is on YouTube). 

Mathis

Selections: Imaginary Flying Machines, NinDjent0, Aliases, Cheeto’s Magazine, Kyros

Originality is something I take very seriously, so you may expect I’m not fond of covers. The fact is there are amazing artists in this world that can honor an original artwork while simultaneously adding their own unique flair. People like this walk a fine line effortlessly, blessing listeners with nostalgia and new experiences in one package. Screw all the fancy talk, I just love when my favorite artists appeal to my nerdy side with covers from anime and videogames!

Studio Ghibli is known primarily for their exceptional animation and art style, but fans across the world will instantly recognize the tune to “My Neighbor Totoro”. A great tune and a great film no doubt, but Ponyo is my cup of tea, and Imaginary Flying Machines (with the help of Destrage) have the most colorfully heavy cover of “Ponyo On The Cliff”. I have to play this track at least three times in a row, my brain becomes addicted and just one hit of this cheerfully chaotic song isn’t enough to satisfy.

Sometimes my emotions get the best of me, and the Imaginary Flying Machines covers don’t hit me in my feels like I need. Every now and then I have to embrace my less fun emotions and lament with the proper soundtrack. In times like these I listen to “Aquatic Ambience” from Donkey Kong Country, and if I’m feeling that strange angry sadness then NinDjent0 has my back with their cover of “Aquatic Ambience” as I headbang the tears flow from my eyes, flying to ceiling, then to the floor, then the ceiling again. A vicious cycle that repeats until the song ends.

Sebastian

Selections: Contrarian

Honestly, this is overall a pretty tough playlist to make additions to; both because of the fact that a lot of the covers bands do are only in demos and unpublished YouTube videos and whatnot, but also because there really are just not many prog metal cover songs out there. But I did find one: Contrarian‘s cover of Death‘s “Nothing is Everything”. This cover shows what Death might have sounded like had they been an underground tech death band in the 2000s. With deeper guttural growls relative to Chuck’s mid-range harshes, nasty pinch harmonics, and of course, the hypnotic riff melody that went with late-era Death.

Related Progressive Subway Articles

• Novena
• Kyros
• Contrarian

The post Playlist – Best Covers appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Do you conduct the music you’re listening to; waving your hands in the air like a Hogwarts dropout as the Best Guitar Fill of All Time roars through your head? Do you get that look on your face (you know: the one where people aren’t sure whether you’re weeping or gently farting) when the drums completely switch up the tempo and blast beats the song into overdrive? Are your friends and loved ones in constant danger of being shushed as you count them into the Most Epic Part Of The Song?

Us too.

That’s why our brave contributors have put together our picks of some of the best moments in Prog. Epic cleans, amazing drum sections, solos, fills and bass drops, all here for your aural pleasure. Staying true to our underground focus, we’re bringing you huge musical moments from the smallest bands.

Scroll down to find our playlists, an explanation of what we chose from each writer, links to any featured band reviews, and the comments section; where you can tell us what we missed!

Nick

Selections: The Escapist by Jekyll (chorus), Alastor the Blind by The Morgana Phase (bridge), Typewriter II by Panzerballett (intro)

I’ll never forget getting out of work, flipping on my local alt rock station during their international showcase hour, and being thrown right into the transcendental chorus of “The Escapist” by Jekyll. Coming from The Whispering Galleries EP, Jekyll takes notes from the early works of Muse (particularly Showbiz) yet makes a sound that is entirely their own. First kicking in at 1:45 (nearly halfway through!) the theatrical chorus cuts through the built tension and unease. The lyrics themselves hit hard, portraying someone filled with regrets overtaken by emotion. It’s simple, but effective.

My second pick is from everyone’s favorite The Dear Hunter knockoff, The Morgana Phase. “Alastor the Blind” comes off of the badass rock opera II: The Eyes of Time and, while I’m an absolute sucker for the chorus, I also hate being repetitive. Instead of that, I’m going to be focusing on the instrumental bridge that begins around 3:23. Taking a page out of The Dear Hunter‘s theatrics playbook, they slowly build layer upon layer over a clever arpeggiation. While I rag on them for their obvious influences, their songs are filled with neat songwriting tricks like this.

Speaking of neat songwriting, I just HAVE to highlight the introduction to “Typewriter II” by Panzerballett. The toying with stereo sound, hopping ear to ear, is tightly executed and almost goosebump inducing. The use of a typewriter sound effects also help give the impression of the notes being keypresses. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that this may, in fact, be among the coolest ideas in the history of prog metal.

Christopher

Selections: Wilderun, Soulsplitter, Obsidian Tide, Subterranean Masquerade, Clément Belio, Meer

When asked for best song moments my mind instantly goes to about a dozen moments from Wilderun, but I’ll settle for just one: the climax of “The Means to Preserve” at 8:32 as the choir croons ‘Sleep at the edge of the earth, far from the spring of life’s…’ cue Evan Berry screaming: ‘… REBIRTH’ and then the epic instrumental section kicks in. Chills everytime. My second moment goes to “Disconnected” from Soulsplitter, and the gorgeous tapping sequence at 3:37 with subtle piano chords and delicate female vocal accompaniment which feels like being adrift in a psychedelic sea.  

Obsidian Tide know how to do an epic moment and none grabs me like the climax of “Pillars of Creation” at 3:05: snare rolls and massive strums accompany some of the best lyrics I’ve heard in years: ‘a secret star a shining gem, a regal night sky diadem, the vault of heaven welcome’s another god’; an incredibly catchy evocation of something intangible and transcendent. Their kinfolk Subterranean Masquerade are also one of my picks. A song where the climactic refrain in the chorus is about ‘striking a minor note in a place that was made for fairytales’ needs to end on an appropriate moment of melancholy, and “Place For Fairytales” does it perfectly in its glorious final chorus (5:14) with the poignant revelation from our singer ‘I am the vagabond’ before the plaintive cry of a fiddle kicks in, perfectly encapsulating all the melancholy of the difficult journey ahead. 

I’m a sucker for a bit of good piano work and two of these picks have it in spades: Clément Belio’s “Take Your Time” is a gorgeous prog/jazz symphony segueing through multiple movements until it reaches what sounds like a close, but then that piano solo at 6:37 kicks in and it’s like the sun has burst from behind the clouds to reinvigorate you. Meanwhile, “Honey” by Meer is a wonderful work of proggy art rock and in the epic final chorus (4:45) of this song there’s so much going on to enjoy the Haken-esque backing vocals,  joyous piano work which culminates in an ascent up the keys which never fails to put a smile upon my face.

Will

Selections: Hands of Despair, Aquilus, Toundra, Alter of Plagues,

A truly epic moment in music is something hard to quantify or define – but we damn well know it when we hear it. It can be a moment when the song seems to be kicked into a whole new level. “Crimson Boughs” by Hands of Despair, a darling of this blog, has a double whammy here. First at the 2.50 mark with some menacing vocals and one of the coolest verse structures I’ve heard in a long time (also objectively the best pronunciation of the word ‘North’ ever committed to tape). This track keeps on giving with an epic build up and release of tension crashing into soaring clean vocals at the 5.18 point. That’s the beautiful moment that you listen to a track on repeat for.

In the theme of menacing sounds, Alter of Plagues‘ “Mills” is one of the most riveting introductions to an album ever. Piercing violin; distorted, demented spasms of vocals; down-tuned bass and ominous drum lines. The first drop of the bass and drums is the key moment that lets you know what you’re in for with this album.

I’m forever grateful to my colleague, Zach who introduced me to Aquilus. Listening through I was blown away by the ending to the track “Loss” where, for the final verse, the music pulls out and the rough, hushed vocals continue on mirroring a motif originally laid down by the piano. It’s beautiful, haunting and terrifying all at once.

Finally, to warm things back up again like a warm bath after a cold day, we have Toundra‘s opening track to their third album, “Ara Caeli”. Translating to ‘The Alter of Heaven’ this track is the first step in a beautiful journey of an album. After the opening delicate strings, Toundra‘s distinctive full, rich sound kicks in and it’s gorgeous.

Zach

Selections: Ne Obliviscaris, Wilderun, Dessiderium, Hath, Abiotic, Vale of Pnath, Aquilus, An Abstract Illusion, Aethereus, Dyssidia

I rarely, and I mean rarely love an album upon first listen. I think what a lot of people underestimate is that well-written music is no different from a well-written book in the sense that you won’t get everything on your first read. There are details that you’ll pick up on the second, third, and maybe fourth reread that’ll make you appreciate it that much more. But, you think of those seminal moments on the first read that made you go back for another go-around. With my favorite albums, I’ll remember those massive riffs or vocal lines, but I’ll catch new details or riffs that I’d never caught before. And that makes me enjoy the music that much more, but it all starts with a single moment that I caught upon first listen. That’s why there are so many picks up there.

So, we’re going to start with the moment that made me absolutely lose my god-damn mind the first time I heard it. The bass break in ‘Devour Me, Colossus’ by Ne Obliviscaris is quite possibly one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard. After nearly 9 minutes of going on this journey, building with each new section, you’re treated to an amazing bassline and yet another amazing buildup with the riff that starts underneath it, soaring right into one of the finest finales I’ve ever heard. Speaking of bass, Abiotic promised a dueling bass solo between Killian Duarte and Jared Smith from Archspire, and delivered on it to the highest degree.

It would be cheating to put ‘Blackwater Park’ on here, so I opted for the next best thing. Wilderun‘s ‘Garden of Fire’ with Evan Berry’s absolutely beautiful delivery of the clean vocals around the 6:15 mark that has provided plenty of motivation on those tough gym days. Hath, a band that don’t usually use clean vocals (but are welcome whenever they pop up), have quite the amazing line in ‘Decollation’ about being baptized in muck. Makes me feel like an Uruk’hai warrior riding into battle whenever I listen to it. And while we’re on the topic of amazing vocals, I can’t forget to mention the outstanding voice and delivery of Dyssidia‘s Mitch Brackman in the chorus of ‘Hope’s Remorseful Regret’.

Then there are the occasions where a riff is so good it makes me mosh in my living room. You take one listen to Vale of Pnath‘s ‘Unburied’ and tell me that ending riff isn’t one of the finest things to bless your earholes, especially with that blast beat behind it and how it evolves during the song’s last minute. Then there’s the keyboard and lead guitar combo in An Abstract Illusion‘s ‘Abode of a God’ that drives the song through its several movements.

But then there’s stuff that didn’t stick at all on first listen, which grew into the whole song being that one “moment”. And these are moments I consider my favorite. Dessiderium‘s Aria and Aquilus‘s Griseus have so many of these it was hard to narrow down. The title track on Aria has incredible, emotion-drenched screams throughout and a riff in the middle section that gives me full body chills. Griseus‘s intro track, ‘Nihil’, might be the perfect tone-setter for an album. Aethereus‘s ‘The Living Abyss’ is only last because I find it so much better in the context of Leiden, but that intro will hook any stray listener in immediately.

Sebastian

Selections: Overtoun, Cryptodira, The Offering, Charlie Griffiths, Sweven, Growth

I don’t remember which one of these people thought of the idea of “best song moments” for our next Subway Playlist, but I will say, they did not know what kind of can of worms they were opened by such a suggestion. When each of us got down and started listing our favorite song moments, whatever we had just wasn’t enough. A snowball becomes an avalanche. One “Omg, but how can we forget about this track!” leads to another and we then have 20 picks each to choose from, which would be far too many for a digestible playlist. So, I took the task of whittling down my list to a manageable six choices of cool moments of underground (and underground-ish) prog metal artists and wrote about them enough so that I feel like I gave them justice.

I will begin with a track from one of my favorite progressive/tech death metal albums of last year Overtoun‘s “Pitch-Black”. This track begins with more of the band’s signature style of mixing the technical death/thrash style of Revocation with the old-school death metal tendencies that Death inspired, full of squealing pinch harmonics, groovy riffage, and death growls. However, what really stood out to me on my first few listens to this was the smoothest of Opethian transitions at 2:23 from the hostile combination of hostile growls and electric, high-gain guitar riffs to an unexpected sentimental interlude of acoustic guitar chords (with a timber almost sounding like a ukelele) accompanied by growing violin flourishes. This interlude is then followed up by more prog death from your inner hell, but this moment of lush respite is akin to a ray of hope amongst the dark storm that surrounds it. 

How often is it that you hear harsh vocal poetry? Honestly, Cryptodira showed me that it should be a hell of a lot more than I currently do because their intro to “Self-(Affect/Efface)” is really neat. Beginning with nothing but an ominous ambiance and solo drum fills, the fills back chanting growls which fill this minimal space with disgust, grief, and brutality. The growls are actually done by two of the band members who have their own harsh vocal styles and cadences, and having them alternate gives you that similar love for acts like White Ward and Hands of Despair. It’s always brilliant hearing different harsh vocal styles implemented side by side, and on the same track, and having them lament the suffering of history and the separation of the self makes it all the more novel.

To make a third quick mention to one of my favorite proggy dissodeath bands Growth, their 2020  output features some of the chunkiest, technical riffs I’ve listened to, and “Darkly, It Tightens Its Grip:” is not different. It finishes its six-minute attack of dense dissonant instrumentation with a dense, bulky riff that meticulously pounds you into a fine paste. But the moment I want to focus on here is what follows: an out-of-place spoken word interlude that escalates to a screamed word interlude as a woman pleads to someone unknown (Her significant other? Her nurse? The audience? Herself? We don’t know) but what we don’t know about this situation makes it all the more absurd when we hear it, and it’s very uncomfortable. This makes for quite the memorable transition into the next track.

The next moment I will reference has pretty much become an underground metal classic at this point. And yes, I am referring to the phenomenon that is “Just another way! Another Way! Another Step into the…” in The Offering’s debut album. It is in the second track of the album which is probably my favorite in a group of high-class songs. You are introduced to this moment at the 0:24 second mark, and it is a thrashy, groovy chorus, which is followed by technical riffs, guitar techniques, and soaring vocals more fitting to power metal (this band is certainly a fusion of many metal genres). But it is not until the build-up that leads to the moment at 2:02 where this familiar chorus really pops off with a three-member vocal harmony. This pop-off still gives me the stank face to this day.

The next artist I’ll mention is also not entirely unknown, but his Spotify page has less than 10k monthly listeners, and that is Charlie Griffiths. It really wasn’t until his solo album that I finally realized that he was for sure my favorite Haken member. All those years of listening to their zany, groovy riffs and I didn’t realize exactly how much Griffiths played a role in Haken’s songwriting that made moments in their material amazing. The moment from one of his songs I wish to mention is in “Dead in the Water”, one of the most rhythmic and avant-garde tracks on the album. This song introduces a few headbanger riffs from djentle chugs to riffs closer to a wacky prog/avant-garde death metal band but one of these riff arrangements is reorganized into an instrumental duo breakdown played by the sax and xylophone-sounding synths which is soon accompanied in harmony with some guitars, and you have a memorable groove. 

The final moment I’ll be writing about is from one of my favorite underground prog metal debuts The Eternal Resonance by Sweven. The album is filled with many impressive climaxes like this one but the moment on “Mycelia” is easily my favorite. For the first four and a half minutes, the song ebbs and flows with atmospheric, distorted guitar chords, blast beats, and vocals reminiscent of Chuck Schuldiner. This all builds tension as the song goes on with reverb that makes you feel like you’re in a chasm. Then at 4:56, the band introduces a guitar riff that’s as ominous as it is epic. While Sweven fleshes out this big doomy riff, various instruments accompany it: rolling drum fills, jazzy rhythm guitar, groovy bass, and fluttering keyboard arrangement embellish the backdrop with increasing velocity as the riff is drawn out to a satisfying conclusion.

Related Progressive Subway Articles:

• Hath
• Dessiderium
• Aethereus
• Dyssidia
• Aquilus
• Hands of Despair
• Overtoun
• Cryptodira
• Charlie Griffiths
• Sweven
• The Offering
• Growth
• Wilderun
• Clément Belio
• An Abstract Illusion (coming soon)
• Obsidian Tide
• Subterranean Masquerade
• Meer
• Soulsplitter

The post Playlist – The Best Moments in Prog appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Mathis, Sam, Sebastian, Will, and Zach are already doing their part: Can you do yours? Stay Hydrated; Think icy thoughts; Break out the corpse paint and enjoy the Progressive Subway’s playlist ov the month!

As always, keep scrolling to see what each contributor chose and why. You’ll also find album links at the bottom of the page.

Sebastian:

Selections: Tomarum, IER, Cicada the Burrower, Kreationist, She Said Destroy, Dreadnought, The Chemical Mind, Thy Light, Dark Fortress, Antipope, Stormkeep, Summoner’s Circle, Esoctrilihum

Well, it looks like the time is here. The fun, bright, and carefree days of summer are coming to an end, and many of us (Zach, Sam, and I included) are going back to school. So, what better music is there to prepare us for the grueling hardship of graduate school than the cultish land of black metal. Yep, this is not only a playlist to put on when you’re in the mood to get brain-blasted into another realm, but it is a playlist for when you’ve abandoned all hope and need a playlist to cry along to.

I added a general variety of progressive black, and a couple of borderline prog black metal songs from Thy Light’s legendary DSBM album Suici.De.Pression, and Stormkeep’s perilous debut album. I also wanted to provide a mix of more abrasive prog black metal artists along with lush and melodic artists. The harder songs I added were pulled from the putrid soundscapes of hell that come out of Esoctrilihum, the demonic Japanese spirits of the damned that lurk in the music of IER, or the awakening whirlwind present in Tómarúm’s debut album. 

A song on the opposite side of the spectrum of filth is from Cicada the Burrower’s 2021 album, Corpseflower; this is an incredibly beautiful album with crystalline guitar tones, saccharine hooks, and an overall gorgeous atmosphere. Stuff like this is very common in blackgaze stuff, but this album is unique. Similarly, I added songs from Summoner’s Circle, Kreationist, and The Chemical Mind because they are primarily prog-black most of their duration but have isolated moments of juxtaposing sonic beauty, like an oasis on a hateful desert. Other songs I chose because of their focus on catchy lead guitar melodies are “Sharpening the Blade” by She Said Destroy and “Apostle of Infinite Joy” from Antipope. 

Other songs I like for more miscellaneous reasons. For instance, the ending to Dark Fortress’s “The Spider in the Web” is just sick, in a similar way to the closing riffs in the songs on Opeth’s Deliverance. Another is from Dreadnought’s 2019 album Emergence, one of the most detailed and progressive atmospheric black metal albums I’ve heard, with loads of keys, varied female clean vocals and screams, odd song structures, and tempo shifts galore.

Will:

Selections: Dragged into Sunlight, Hoth, Stortregn, Batushka, Ultar, Epitaphe, Numenorean

My selections here reflect my being more drawn to melodic, atmospheric themes in music. Hoth, Numenorean and Ultar offer unforgiving soundscapes and cosmic horror themes in an immersive blackened post-metal style that threaten to swallow the listener whole. 

Though I haven’t chosen a track from their excellent new album II, I certainly wanted to include some Epitaphe, just for the amazing jagged soundscapes the french band is capable of producing.

In terms of oppressive melody, it doesn’t get much icier than Batushka, whose Eastern Orthodox Christian-infulenced imagery with a dark twist is sure to cool you down during the rampant heatwaves of summer.

Mathis:

Selections: IATT, Deconstructing Sequence, Antisoph

I know very little about black metal or progressive black metal. I also do not like or listen to black or prog black metal. However, there are some cool things happening in that terrifying void of distant screams and relentless blast beats that are actually pretty neat.

Zach: 

Selections: Aquilus, Abduction, Doldrums, Galar, White Ward

Let it be noted that I am a lifelong death metal fan. In the seemingly never-ending subgenre wars on which one is cooler, I’ll always say death metal. But for some reason, progressive black metal just hits different. I find something incredibly soothing about the long-winded nature of proggy black metal, like an ever constant ebb and flow between soft acoustic parts with a sampled wind sound and trem riffs that sound as dark as the winter nights themselves. Because I’m a native Floridain, I don’t know what anything besides summer is, so for the sake of this playlist, let’s merely pretend to be in a winter cabin in the middle of nowhere, shall we? For the sake of atmosphere, just go along with it. 

The members of Galar might as well be the human embodiments of winter. They do everything a proggy black metal band should, and then some. The frigid riffs, strings that don’t sound programmed, and plenty of triumphant clean vocal sections. If you need to fill that Windir hole left in your heart, these guys are for you. And speaking of doing everything right, White Ward’s brand new opus was too popular to join the ranks of Subway Approved albums, but that doesn’t mean I can’t sneak it onto this playlist. Just like our first choice, the unconventional sax and noir atmosphere make you feel like you’re standing in the middle of a snowy, quiet city after dark. On the other side of things, the symphonic, sweeping music of Aquilus will take you to an abandoned campground in a dark fall afternoon, just as the sun is setting. I feel like it’s cheating to include one song, so if my pick is up your alley, make sure to check out the whole album! Abduction piles on the old fashioned production with modern writing sensibilities, with song structures more Opethian than the traditional black metal buildups. But enough with black metal to chill (ha) to, I know you want a little primal aggression in there too, so I added Doldrums’ and their beautifully horrific new album into the mix. 

Sam:

Selections: Enslaved, Phendrana, Fjoergyn, Massen, Dordeduh

As the planet downloaded TR 43 and used Overheat, we from the Subway opened our underground cooling systems and brought out some winterly chill in the form of some nice and cold black metal to counterbalance. Unfortunately for the planet though, we’re a bunch of cowards and have eluded the raw Nokia recordings in the arctic forests of Norway in favor of the warmer progressive variant with fashionable turtleneck sweaters. And I have opted for an even warmer route by going folky as well. Dordeduh brings the Romanian pagan atmosphere with dream-like songwriting and Massen adds a violin to a dynamic prog/black/death concoction. Phendrana is an atmospheric band full of yearning and melancholy, and Enslaved add in the Floydian touches to really hammer in that our planet is fucked. Finally Fjoergyn goes for the epic route as a soundtrack to the incoming apocalypse. Perfect.

• IER
• Cicada The Burrower
• Antipope
• Summoner’s Circle
• Esoctrilihum
• Dordeduh
• Massen
• Epitaphe
• Aquilus
• Dordeduh
• Stortregn
• IATT
• The Chemical Mind

The post Playlist – Midsommar Progressive Black Metal appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

True to our mission, Will, Sebastian, and Mathis have focused mainly on smaller, underground bands, but made sure to include some classic songs from more popular bands as well (after all, what’s summer without some ice-cream to enjoy?).

So whether you’re a sun-worshipper, a beach-partier, or someone who’d rather stick to the shade with a good book, we hope you enjoy the more relaxed vibes from the Progressive Subway Summer Playlist. As always, keep scrolling to read more from our writers who contributed to the playlist, and for related links to featured bands that the Progressive Subway has already reviewed.

Is it a common thing for your music taste to change with the years? Mine does. In the dark days of winter, I gravitate toward heavy, oppressive music; death metal and doom – almost as a reflection of the cold and gloom that’s around me. When it’s summer, I find myself wanting to listen to lighter, more upbeat fare.

I think this is reflected in my picks for this month’s playlist. Camel and Caravan have that beautiful, light, classic British prog feeling. Toundra and David Maxim Micic have a beautiful, calm, contemplative sound that very much gels with the ‘chill summer’ mood that I’m trying to cultivate in this playlist. I also picked some long, ethereal, floating pieces by Chris and Diagonal which are just sublime jams to spin up either on a long drive, or while relaxing under a relentless sun.

As far as more mainstream tracks go, I couldn’t resist picking Mastodon‘s “Megalodon” – if only for that amazing surf-rock lick after the intro!

When we settled on choosing “Upbeat Summer and Aquatic Prog” as our July monthly playlist, I was pretty excited. Not because I’m particularly fond of the hot summer weather, but because there is an abundance of great prog metal jams inspired by summer themes. And unsurprisingly, when we looked through our review catalog to see if there were any summer-related album themes, we were welcomed with buckets full of great underground choices. In this playlist, I wanted to include a few mainstream picks, songs that sound arid and dry, beachy, oceany, and watery songs, as well as songs about our benevolent sun, ruler of the summer realm.

For my mainstream picks, I immediately needed to go with one of the most serene, watery prog songs out there, “Ruby Pool” by VOLA‘s colorful and summer-infused sophomore album. Next, I went with the opening track to Voyager‘s even more vibrant Colours in the Sun from 2019. And how can I skip out on an upbeat aquatic prog playlist without including songs from two epic prog metal classics, Haken‘s “Aquarium” and Wilderun‘s “Storm Along”; both songs are from albums that rank among my top prog metal albums of all time. However, as mainstream as I had thought Wilderun was, I stood in utter shock and confusion to see that their Spotify page had dwindled under 20k monthly listeners. This prompted me to pick Wilderun‘s Epigone as the next album on my reviewing list.

Summer and aquatic-sounding music have a wide variety of musical styles. When it comes to the songs I gathered from the prog metal underground that are louder, energetic, technical, and chorus-driven include Ray Alder‘s “What the Water Wants”, “Volition” by the Pakistani band Takatak, “Full Fathom Five” by the renewed Atlantis Chronicles, and Cave of Swimmer‘s “The Sun 2021”. Speaking of the burning ball of gas making this all possible, I wanted to also include the songs: “Sun Dance” by Novena, sung by the genre legend, Ross Jennings, “Scorched Earth” from this year’s progressive sludge debut band Cobra the Impaler, and Lalu‘s “Paint the Sky”.

I also added an assortment of gems from the instrumental side of aquatic-sounding prog. Personally, I love instrumental music, and I find it an even greater accomplishment for a band to be able to convey the feelings we have, say toward hot summer days, the beach, or the depths of the ocean through the implementation of instruments alone rather than through bluntly telling us with words. This is where I included the serene, and immersively aquatic songs like “Nectar Ocean’s Depths” by Xavier Boscher, “As the Water Covers the Sea” by the acclaimed underground prog band Umpfel, as well as “Ocean Grip” and “Oceania” from the jazz-fusion virtuosos at Syncatto and Coevality. On the opposite side of the instrumental prog scene is the less tranquil, more technical, and manic area where “The Blood, the Sin, and the Djinn” and “Abcreation” live. Both fuse their brands of prog and technical death metal with Arabian music and surf rock. For those interested in crazy technical metal genre fusions, I would check out the rest of Sleep Terror’s work in general, as they have done tech death albums with country-rock, bluegrass, funk, spaghetti western, as well as the aforementioned surf rock.

Summer can hold different significance for different people. In Florida, it’s the time of year where we embrace and enjoy the heat of hell’s most vigorous flames along with a humidity so thick it basically waterboards you. I suppose Florida and other areas with similar climates are the minority, so my summer playlist picks will more closely relate to High School Musical. For all of the older folks, I have added “Hamburger Sandwich”, a djenty take on old-school rap and hiphop. For the younger crowd, we have “Pail”, a djenty take on club music I guess. I don’t know what exactly plays at clubs, but I imagine it is kind of like this. Both of these tracks are from Chorder the djent wizard.

If you are looking for some lighter listening for your sunrise surf sesh try Azure‘s “The Jellyfish” or Owane‘s “The Summer Jam”. Finally, for the party addicts who need the soundtrack to match the YOLO lifestyle there is “Right Now” by Nekrogoblikon.

• Diagonal
• Umpfel
• Novena
• Cave of Swimmers
• Coevality
• Subterranean Masquerade
• Azure
• Syncatto
• Mental Fracture
• Cobra the Impaler
• Sleep Terror
• Atlantis Chronicles

The post Playlist – Prog Music for Summer appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

In our ongoing efforts to please everyone over the globe, the Progressive Subway Department for Musical Weather Suitability have devised a playlist for you that can at once capture the liveliness of Spring as well as the longing for shelter and a bit of coziness that comes with Autumn: Jazz.

Yes, Jazz. Often raucous and lively, often sombre and contemplative. The ultimate blend of music to suit your needs. Our writers Mathis, Sebastian and Will have tirelessly scoped out the very best the underground has to offer for Jazz-infused Prog music for your listening pleasure, whatever the season. Enjoy.

Will

Though I’m no expert on the subject, I’ve been a fan of Jazz for some time. There’s a lot to like about and engage with in Jazz and it’s always exciting to hear it being incorporated into prog. In selecting tracks for this playlist, I kept in mind the three main “traits” of Jazz that I love (Calm, smoky atmospheres, complete creative chaos and inspired technical musicianship) and found tracks in the prog-universe (“progosphere”?) that best reflected these traits:

Pure creative chaos can be found in Ephel Death’s “Passageway” embodies the creative chaos that I enjoy about Jazz and that Tom Waits used to great effect in tracks like “Midtown”. Ephel Death takes it further in adding overdriven guitar and the primal rawness of the human voice’s scream to create an atmosphere of pure energy. Candiria brings some similar energy with a proggy-jazz infused rap-metal which has to be heard to be believed!

At the extreme other end of the spectrum, Maudlin on the Wall embodies the calm, smooth, melodic sounds of artists like Dexter Gordon or Coleman Hawkins. SE:UM has been a band very close to my heart since I saw a few of their early tours in Seoul. “Abyss” is a smoky, mysterious piece that would make a beautiful soundtrack to a Korean Film-Noir, by effortlessly blending jazz and traditional Korean instruments to tremendous effect.

For the sheer technical brilliance that we so often find in Jazz musicians, I suggest you look no further than Mestís. Technical brilliance as well as heartfelt playing, Mestís is known for a lot of genre-hopping in his work and the track “Menta” is 5 minutes of pure brilliance.

Keeping true to The Progressive Subway’s mission of connecting listeners with underground proggressive music, most of my selection has been taken from smaller bands. However, I couldn’t resist sneaking some more well-known bands into the mix: Rivers of Nihil are well known for their incorporation of Jazzy saxophone solos to be incorporated into their track. And, after the lukewarm fan reception to latest album The Works, it’s important to go back to this band to remember why we fell in love with them in the first place. Jazz lost it’s best new drummer when Brann Daylor of Mastodon first spun up a metal CD. Daylor’s jazz-infused drumming, full of swung beats and beautifully subtle grace notes is sublime and deserves a spotlight in this playlist. Finally, no prog-jazz playlist would be complete without a nod to jazz powerhouse Snarky Puppy who, through the overwhelming force of their incredible musicianship, cannot be denied a spot on this playlist.

I enjoyed my jazzy journey making this playlist. Readers, please send me your suggestions of further jazz prog I may have missed!

Sebastian

For all of my jazz fusion picks, I decided to stay true to my prog metal roots. There is almost no underground band that I think better exemplifies the stereotypical conception of prog metal / jazz fusion than Panzerballett and the lesser-known Wax People. These both convey the complexity and precision of the two genres well and they authenticate the jazz flavor by including full-time saxophone and clarinet players. I also wanted to include the equally impressive instrumental jams from Mental Fracture and Coevality which have strong jazzy elements mixed in with their proggy breakdowns.

Another small but growing field of jazz-fusion metal is the resurgence of zeuhl in prog metal. Back in 2021, I had the privilege of reviewing Papangu’s debut album Holoceno. Not knowing jack about what this sophisticated, jazzy subgenre of progressive rock entailed I was thrown down a rabbit hole of researching Zeuhl history from the classics produced by Magma and Eskaton to modern gems like All Traps on Earth. To the standards of a die-hard zeuhl fan, the compositions in Holoceno are a bit down to earth and digestible but it still is one of the most cohesive fusions of metal and zeuhl to date and I would easily recommend it. I also wanted to include a song from a band nearly nobody has heard of; Odd Fiction may not be the most experienced but they deliver a short EP that provides a challenging listen and a more dissonant approach to the genre.

Mathis

When I think of jazz fusion the first artist that comes to mind is Plini. He played a major role in my interest and love for fusion, and was one of the first prog artists I discovered. I used to think that everyone was just trying to sound like him, but my ears were untrained. Eventually I discovered a plethora of other great jazz fusion acts. Nuclear Power Trio (NPT) is much more grand and energetic than the typical progressive jazz fusion you may know and love. For better or worse NPT is a satirical instrumental fusion band that consists of Kim Jong Un on Drums, Donald Trump as the guitarist, and Vladimir Putin on bass. It really is a sight to behold, and it conveys a beautiful message that music can unify us no matter how different we may be.

Then on the other hand we have Sound Struggle‘s “The Bridge” which is a story to be taken much more seriously. This song is a twenty minute epic that sits halfway through a massive concept album. Sound Struggle takes a different approach to fusion and blends metalcore with blaring horns, synths, and the occasional obscure instrument. Now we have strayed quite a bit from Plini‘s softer ethereal sound, but we can go even further with The Sound That Ends Creation (TSTEC). Who would have guessed grindcore and jazz mix so perfectly together? No one, it is actually nightmarish. TSTEC sounds like the soundtrack to zombie clowns attacking the horns section of a middle school band on methamphetamine. The music sounds kinda cool though, there’s nothing else like it.

Related Progressive Subway Articles

• Wax People
• Papangu
• Coevality
• Von Citizen
• Sound Struggle
• James Norbert Ivanyi
• Umpfel
• Mental Fracture

The post Playlist – Jazz-Infused Prog appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Our writers Mathis, Sebastian, Will and Zach have each chosen their favourite song from the Meshuggah back catalogue as well as finding hidden gems from smaller bands that we think you’ll love if you’re a Meshuggah fan.

We hope you enjoy this month’s Progressive Subway Playlist. As always, keep scrolling for some more info about our picks from the writers themselves (including a veritable thesis from Sebastian) as well as links to albums of bands included in this playlist that The Progressive Subway has previously reviewed.

Will

The connection I have with Meshuggah was they’re one of the bands I listened to almost on a loop when I was studying Art for my A-Levels. In the school’s art studio, I would find some out-of-the-way corner, open whatever painting or sketch I was working on at the time and spin up ObZen or Destroy Erase Improve on my iPod. Then, everything else in the world seemed to fall away. I was blissfully alone; just me and the texture of paints, the smell of turpentine and the cacophony of Djent.

Finding smaller bands that have taken a leaf out of the Meshuggah playbook has therefore been something of a nostalgic experience for me. I couldn’t resist including “Future Breed Machine” from Destroy Erase Improve on this playlist. I love the incorporation of the alarm sound in the intro (and then again at various points throughout the track). And I think the way the vocals are delivered and punctuated in such a way as to add to incorporate them as yet another staccato instrument in the ensemble. My love of electronic and siren-like noises in djent informed my inclusion of “Thousand Arms Fortress” by Returning We Hear The Larks for their technical, pinch-harmonic heavy riffs that could well be the soundtrack to a murderous AI.

Zach

In my humble (yet, undoubtedly correct) opinion, Meshuggah are probably one of the coolest bands in existence. No band has created a signature sound so sought after that it spawned a whole new genre in the process. And you can say whatever you want about “djent”, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Some bands have come incredibly close, while others see putting their own spin on chugs and polyrhythms, but none of them sound like Meshuggah. Maybe it’s Haake’s second to none, mind melting drums. Or maybe it’s the jazzy sensibilities of Thordendal’s solos. Either way, ‘Shuggah’s influence is here to stay, and I for one welcome our 8 stringed overlords.

Hippotraktor is the youngest and one of the most interesting bands from our selection of chuggy offerings today. They’re clearly ‘Suggah and Gojira influenced with their riffs and ferocious vocals, buttheir cleaner sections remind me of Karnivool and ISIS‘s softer soundscapes. If you like a bit of post-metal buildup and clean vocals with your chugs, these guys are for you. Omega District and Humavoid are cut from the same cloth, adding symphonic elements to the core sound and creating amazing results in the process. The former rely on synths, keeping with the Blade Runner theme of the album, while the latter features prominent piano and strings all the way through. Letters from the Colony and Limbo bring back the heavy, sacrificing the symphonic thrills for a more clear-cut, djent-y sound. And then we have Vildhjarta. Many of you will probably know them, as they’ve been somewhat of a prog-metal darling throughout the years, but I couldn’t not include them. They are what happens when someone says Meshuggah aren’t rhythmically weird enough. I dare you to try and count along with ‘masstaden nationalsang (under vatten)’. If I could, I’d include all of Masstaden Under Vatten, but you’ll just have to lose your mind to this one song. Hey, maybe it’ll make you check the whole album out. I highly recommend it!

Sebastian

Well, well, well it looks like the time has come: the month of Meshuggah’s 9^th (or 10^th) studio album. I think it’s no secret by my choice in album review selections that I am a huge fan of their patented style which seems endlessly sought after in modern metal. To celebrate such a historic date I want to shine some light on ten, yep you read that correctly, ten underground prog metal bands that are inspired by Meshuggah‘s djent.

Riccardo Moccia is an Italian metal virtuoso who has a knack for creating incredibly industrial, mechanical, evil-sounding, almost blackened djent. We got a promo from his 2022 album Sensed which was released just over a month ago because we’ve been somewhat short-staffed as of late I don’t think we’ll be getting to a full review of Moccia. But he definitely deserves it, god damn it! His songs are all packed in densely with abrasive, dissonant soundscapes, headbanging riffs, and the gutturals of a catacombs demon. One aspect I absolutely love about Meshuggah is their illustration of dark and nihilistic themes. The way they are able to deeply convey the inexorable mechanisms that dictate the universe through relentless, oppressive chugs and unyielding percussion. This is the kind of spirit that Ricco Moccia delivers well on and provides his own spin on it. For this reason, I included his single “Freewill” in the playlist.

Aeons was a band that Dylan and I were fighting over for reviewing back in 2021 because of how interesting they are at face value. They are what it would sound like if a 2000s metalcore band tried making a cross between Opeth and Meshuggah. A lot of the sonic choices used in their Consequences album are questionable but unique, oftentimes blending metal styles that you would never have expected to hear front to back. For instance, there is a song in it that sounds a little bit too close to “Death Whispered a Lullaby”, sandwiched between two djent-tastic songs with aggressive barks and down-tuned, vibrating, mechanical riffs. The highlights from Aeons are the songs that book-end Consequences, closing their album about as well as they started it.

I could not live with myself if I let a “Meshuggah FFO” playlist go by without mentioning Polars Collide, in my opinion, this band is the best reimagining of Meshuggah‘s aesthetic style except they take their music in a more organic and down to Earth direction. Their debut album Grotesque was undoubtedly one of my favorite underground albums of last year and Polars Collide is one of the smaller bands that I am most hoping will succeed in future albums. To give a short summary of what they excel on, they are able to deliver the right balance of disgusting, misanthropic brutality, melody, and sophisticated complexity in their songwriting. Their riffs are memorable and their songs have very progressive twists and turns that one should expect from a good progressive metal band. Being inspired by other bands like Gojira, Lamb of God, Death, Sepultura, and a pinch of Opeth, they have added an excellent album to the pool of extreme metal.

Giant’s Knife is a band that I reviewed last year and I will say that they are one of the three bands that I believe I most underrated. Being smaller, of course, their production level might not be as expensive as many bigger bands and I complained a good bit about the “stream of consciousness” songwriting style of the last two closing tracks. However, I will say that most of the tracks on this album are very coherent, filled with melody, and are pretty much bangers. To give you more of an idea of what they sound like, they are an instrumental (or should I say, InstruDjental) progressive metal band with post-metal leanings; they take their greatest inspirations from Cloudkicker, The Contortionist, Meshuggah, and AAL. Currently at 15 monthly listeners on Spotify, their music is highly underappreciated, so I would check them out and share a little bit of love.

Woe Unto Me is not the kind of band that you might expect from extreme djent; rooted in the deep atmosphere of funeral doom, it was surprising for me to see that they released a death-doom/progressive metal album during March of last year. The 30-minute EP, Spiral-Shaped Hopewreck is an atmospheric experience, drifting through the cosmos, and contemplating existence. Woe Unto Me are in their comfort zone when conveying deeper soundscapes which contrast well with their more proggy EP. The tracks ebb and flow between small spacey interludes which sets the tone for a mellow and soothing listen; that is until the final non-interlude track comes into play which is a cover of Meshuggah‘s “Lethargica”. This cover brings the old Obzen track into modern soundscapes and delivers effective grooves with deep impact and solid production.

My experience with WAIT (We are In Transit) is a perfect example of how incongruent expectations can ruin your experience of an album. Coming off of their high from Egoiista, Alex Weber and Max Phelps from Exist were joined by Charlie Eron, and Anup Sastry from Intervals to create the debut album for WAIT. The Cynic-esque, prog-death prodigies came into this album with very different goals than what one gets from their other projects. This is better defined as atmospheric djent, with crooning, mellow vocals, and lengthy chugging sections. I would say their album The End of Noise takes the spirit of Meshuggah with their immutable, chuggy, high-gain, palm-muted, polyrhythmic riffs; when WAIT gets on a groove, they basically do not stop until they’ve sapped all resistance out of you. It seems as though a lot of people don’t mind this quite as much as I did but if they meandered less, I would like The End of Noise much more because as it stands, it is one of the more unique djent albums to come out over the past few years.

For those who don’t know, Stömb is probably one of the most interesting instrumental djent artists to exist in 2022. Their songs are long and highly complex, not stopping too long on one musical piece before changing gears to another. Their songs take several detours that build up to monster crescendos with the combination of post-metal induced, pounding djent riffs, alien sci-fi keyboards, and atmospheric synth chords. Their guitar tones sound like a mix between the lowness of Meshuggah and the punchy, grooviness of Gojira. From the looks of it, Stömb will be coming out with a new album sometime this year and from the singles that were released, I think this one will be a slobberknocker.

Kobong is a band that only the prog metal historians seem to know about, and it is a darn shame because, one, they are the second chronological djent band to exist, and two, their style of funk-metal combined with avant-garde, djenty, prog alternative metal is something to behold. They might be as unknown as they are because they only had two albums before breaking up. Their self-titled debut is a lot more on the alt-metal/funk metal side while their 1997 sophomore album, Chmury nie było is very djenty and groovy. And for the time, competing with albums like Chaosphere and Destroy, Erase, Improve they were very well off in the scene. Who knows, in an alternative universe where Kobong never broke up, it might be Kobong and Meshuggah leading the djent charge together as competing factions.

Atria is an Iranian prog metal band with deep gutturals, heavy, djentrified riffs, and symphonic arrangements somewhat similar to Xerath (but better). In researching for this post I had only recently discovered their 2020 debut album Reincarnation but it is a quick, 28-minute experience that packs their songs with riffs that are heavy and energetic like bouncing bowling balls. The aggression that this band has is something to behold but they do well at spacing out tranquil tracks to separate the sonic beatdowns. Sitting currently at 20 monthly listeners on Spotify, Atria is officially the most underrated band on this list.

Can you imagine the audacity of a band that literally uses the name of an iconic song of their favorite band? I can, Stengah is a French progressive metal band that can be classified as somewhat tech death, somewhat groove metal, somewhat post-metal, but all in all, very djent. The songs on their debut album, SOMA SEMA are tightly written and contain a lot of quality material as far as their riff-writing is concerned. Additionally, they deliver quite a bit of dynamic variation in their songwriting to make sure none of what they have to offer becomes stale, with the inclusion of a power ballad (something that Meshuggah would never do), soothing acoustic interludes, and a saxophone section. Stengah overall excels at delivering quality songs with great use of polyrhythmic riffs, solid percussion and drum fills, and good mix and production.

Mathis

Admittedly I am not the biggest fan of Meshuggah. However, they have grown on me recently. A few months ago I was working with extremely loud equipment, and I am the kind of guy that can’t sit in silence. I always need some sort of soundtrack for whatever it is I am doing, and when working in a loud setting I didn’t like listening to more technical stuff. Enter Koloss. This record quickly became my work music because it was easy to hear amidst all of the grinding, banging, and whirring. Without a doubt my favorite track is “I am Colossus”, it is so slow and groovy and easy to keep track of. Eventually, I had to change up my playlist, ya know how you can aggressively over listen to an album. Well to avoid that I started listening to Humavoid, and I prefer them to Meshuggah because of the alternating vocals as well as the introduction of keyboards. So I listened to them quite a bit and then began searching for other similar bands. That’s when I came across BEAR, ok that is actually dishonest. I listened to them before but wasn’t a fan. I love them now though, and their newest album is great. “Propaganda” is the closest to Meshuggah, but the rest of the album has great grooves and heavy riffs.

Related Progressive Subway Articles:

• Humavoid – Lidless
• Hippotraktor – Meridian
• Polars Collide – Grotesque
• Giant’s Knife – Oracle
• Aeons – Consequences
• WAIT – The End of Noise
• Stengah – SOMA SEMA

The post Playlist – FFO: Meshuggah appeared first on The Progressive Subway.