Style: avant-garde metal, progressive metal, chamber music, progressive rock, Romanticism (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Rush, Mertz, Liturgy
Country: California, United States
Release date: 1 August 2025

What makes metal metal? Indubitably, it’s some blend of attitude, riffs, lyrical themes, instrumentation, and “heaviness” (that last one is to say, you know it when you hear it). Until 2020, I would have thrown in distortion to the list of essential characteristics, but Kaatayra’s Só Quem Viu o Relâmpago à sua Direita Sabe, currently still my album of the decade, changed that as a fully acoustic yet recognizably black metal album. New avant-garde metal band Rintrah push my conceptions of metal even further, abandoning even the harsh vocals of Só Quem. That’s right, The Torrid Clime is classical acoustic guitar, drumming, and reedy, belted clean vocals. So what makes Rintrah metal? 

Their unabashed veneration for the Romantics. I mean, ask anybody; Romantic poetry is hella metal. But seriously, since metal’s earliest days, its practitioners have been neoromantics, intentionally or not. The genre’s acolytes are obsessed with individuality and freedom of expression, an idealization of the past and the exotic (through incorporations of folk music, for example¹), and, above all, a singular desire to attain the sublime. Metal mainstays—crushing heaviness, screamed and growled vocals, blast beats, crazy displays of guitar wizardry, singing of gore and nihilism—all act to make you, the listener, feel small compared to the display of sonic power. As eminent Romantic philosopher Edmund Burke said: “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”² Like Romanticism, metal is, at its heart, a rebellion: against the shackles of a boring life, from the very start in the industrial hellscape of Manchester. It’s designed to make you feel something profound, with heaviness as its modus operandi.

Simply put, metal is obviously Romantic, and Rintrah fully embodies the philosophy more explicitly than any other band I’ve ever heard, so those dulcet acoustic guitars and blast beats are more than enough to be metal to the philosophical core. Rintrah’s Romantic aesthetic is, in a word, audacious. Adorning the album cover of The Torrid Clime’s is the 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, a work which is literally first on Wikipedia if you search “Romantic art.” The lyrics across Rintrah’s debut record are pulled from various Romantic poets—William Blake, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Charlotte Smith.³ There is even a Mertz piece, “Nocturne, Op. 4, No. 2,” on the record fitted in as a mid-album interlude. 

So yeah, The Torrid Clime is pretty damn metal, although musically it’s a far cry from what I’d expect. There are no grandiose orchestrations here à la Mahler, Mendelssohn, or Dvorak. Classical guitarist Justin Collins manages to make his instrument sound like a harp, while Arsenio Santos on bass (Howling Sycamore) gives The Torrid Clime a Rush-like rhythmic edge. The vocals provided by Otrebor (Botanist) and William DuPlain (ex-Botanist) are also Rush-y, powerful, nasal-y tenors; like Geddy Lee, I could see Otrebor and DuPlain’s vocals being a sticking point for listeners. Yet their delivery of the various poems is admirable, with drama, bombast, and spot-on cadence. It’s quite the bardic performance, in fact, and one could easily imagine one of the vocalists with the charmingly strummed guitar lines traveling city to city performing their poetry.⁴ The guitar tones are succulent with plenty of technical embellishment, keeping the music quite harmonically complex. During the faster moments, like those in “Ozymandias” and “On the Giddy Brink,” I even hear strong hints of Kaatayra with the rhythmic intricacy of the guitar parts—not to mention the wonky rhythms of tracks like “The Chariot.” The compositions are also full of masterful transitions which perfectly underscore thematic shifts in the text, such as the transition between the main riff and the softer, richer one in “Fearful Symmetry.” 

For much of The Torrid Clime, the frantic blast beats are in wonderful juxtaposition with the calmer classical guitar and breathily belted vocals, but at times Otrebor’s drumming becomes completely detached from the plot as Collin’s guitar and Santos’ bass fall out of rhythmic contact with him—the vocalists are off doing their own thing in the stratosphere most of the time, regardless. Rintrah’s unique combination of sounds works in its favor until their delicate synergy becomes unraveled. Thankfully, for most of the tracks on The Torrid Clime, Rintrah stay in their lane, letting those euphonious guitar lines, thumping bass, unique vocals, and blast beats all interact with surprising cohesion. The tracks that change up Rintrah’s characteristic sound are also strong points on the record: instrumental “Nocturne, Op. 4, No. 2,” blast-less slow track “Mutability,” and a cappella finale “Into an Echo.” Even within the band’s focused sound, one can never know what to expect. 

The Torrid Clime is a unique album driven by guitars that sound like harps and charismatic vocalists who could travel town to town in some idyllic reimagining of the past. Fraught with gentle tension and unruly percussion, The Torrid Clime doesn’t induce the sublime as obviously as in lots of metal but rather in a wholly unexpected way; as I kept returning to the album, it revealed itself to me in the dramatic performance of the lyrics, in the percussive transitions between riffs, and in the complex, expansive chords. Rintrah is an intriguing project, undoubtedly not for every metalhead, but for those with an open mind and an appreciation for the philosophical, the sublime awaits.

Recommended tracks: Fearful Symmetry, On the Giddy Brink, In Tempests, Into an Echo
You may also like: Botanist, Forêt Endormie, Howling Sycamore, Kaatayra
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp

Label: Fiadh Productions – Bandcamp | Facebook

Rintrah is:
– Justin Collins – guitar
– Otrebor – drums, backing and lead vocals
– William Duplain – lead and backing vocals
– Arsenio Santos – bass

1. The Romantics’ glorification of the past, promotion of shared heritage, and emphasis on extreme emotion all contributed greatly to the rise of nationalism. This is also how I believe NSBM became such a problem in the black metal world. Metal’s full embrace of the Romantics’ philosophy comes with its negatives, too. ︎
2.  From A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ︎
3. Rintrah don’t even quote some of my favorite basic-bitch Romantic poets like Colerdige, Wordsworth, and Keats. Definitely look into all of these Romantic poets, though! ︎
4. The bard is a common Romantic motif in their exaltation of the past. ︎

The post Review: Rintrah – The Torrid Clime appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: screamo, chamber music (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Beethoven, La Dispute, In Fear and Faith, Astor Piazzolla
Country: France
Release date: 14 February 2025

Sometimes an album sinks its teeth into you and latches on in a completely unexpected way. At just thirteen minutes and three tracks, Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne sank its jaws into my flesh as unexpectedly as a sweet golden retriever randomly taking on the temperament of an XL bully. I loved, and still regularly spin, Vivre Encore from the French quartet, but French screamo—even with gorgeous chamber instrumentation—had to be a fluke. There is no way a band with French screamo vocals could triumph on back-to-back releases, right?

Triumph Lorem Ipsum have. That I’d love the chamber instrumentation is a given, so let’s tranquilize the massive pink elephant in the room before discussing the composition further: the vocals are screamo. In French. And I can’t get enough of them. Maxime Foulon absolutely nails the full capacity for emotion in the human voice with his performance—singing about the heartbreaks and successes of parenthood. Even without understanding the language, Foulon’s eviscerating screams, aggressive barks, and wailing cleans evoke raw emotion in a primal way. While his vocals on “Tes Yeux Clos” are still impressive, the performative highlights are found on the back half of the EP. On “Et le Mal,” Foulon follows the rhythmic elegance of the drumming while utilizing the most of his emo-y cleans; accordingly, he takes the melodic lead from one of the instruments for the only time on the album by toning his voice down from the acerbic harshes. Finale “Tes Jours sans Moi” uses his voice to match the instrumental buildup, starting with hushed spoken word and only growing in drama and bombast until he lets out an anguished scream.

The instrumentation is simply divine Baroque-inspired chamber music. In contrast with the harshness of the vocals, the piano, violins, piano, drums, and acoustic guitars are playful in intricate counterpoint, but their defining aspect is a singular intensity I’ve heard in pitifully few albums ever—all of which I consider among the best of all time. Like Ad Nauseam’s Nihil Quam Vacuitas Ordinatum Est or Astor Piazzolla’s Tango: Zero Hour, the instrumentation on Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne is at once extremely dense moment-to-moment but also in possession of an unstoppable sense of forward propulsion. The arpeggiated finger-picked guitar and pizzicato violin often herald the unrelenting momentum, and at other times the violin and piano’s fight for the main melody command the pace, starting within the first minute of “Tes Yeux Clos.” Lorem Ipsum also utilize changing tempos and dynamics to their advantage, as in the violent acoustic trem picking to start “Et le Mal,” the spiraling violin at the end of the same track, or the beginning section of “Tes Jours sans Moi” with its “Moonlight Sonata”-esque pace. 

As if Lorem Ipsum’s godly performances weren’t enough to solidify the EP as the release to beat this year, their songwriting is absurdly awesome, redolent of Ne Obliviscaris but in condensed form. For instance, “Tes Yeux Clos” begins alike “And Plague Flowers the Kaleidoscope” with its dynamic acoustics; soon after the first instrumental swell and scream, Alexander Foulon’s violin sweeps in with the melody, his style classical but raw like Tim Charles; and the final buildup of the song around 4:00 is simply sublime, leading into a crowd chant just like in “Libera.” Even the choice of chamber instrumentation equals to Ne Obliviscaris when they drop to just a string quartet in “Misericorde Pt. 1.” This is not to say Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne sounds like NeO, per se (or at all), but merely to compliment them that their songwriting has truly ascended the mortal plane into that of the gods. Spending a paragraph comparing Lorem Ipsum to a band with which they have almost nothing alike is a stretch, but I struggle to get across how profoundly my taste this record is—how godly the compositions are—without comparison.

Why oh why must the EP be only thirteen minutes long? I need more, and while I love Vivre Encore, it simply doesn’t show the same maturity Lorem Ipsum display here. At even a prim thirty minutes of this quality, I’d be tempted to slap a 10/10 on Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne, but as is, the EP is simply—and a tad frustratingly—not enough. Turning from so-beautiful-it-hurts to painfully raw in an instant, Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne has snared me, the release truly unique and Andy. Of course, Baroque screamo hasn’t really been done before Lorem Ipsum as far as I’m aware, but never have I fallen so in love with a short EP or heard traces of so many other albums I love in a package like this. Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne is at once transcendent of and blind to genre.

Recommended tracks: all three
You may also like: Ad Nauseam, Musk Ox, So Hideous
Final verdict: 9/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: independent

Lorem Ipsum is:
Maxime Foulon • Piano / Vocals 

Arthur Deshaumes • Guitar 

Alexandre Foulon • Violin 

Bastien Gournay • Drums

The post Review: Lorem Ipsum – Même Quand ta Main Quittera la Mienne appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Progressive death metal, folk, chamber music (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Ne Obliviscaris, Opeth, Gorguts
Country: Pennsylvania, United States
Release date: 24 June, 2024

When I show my music taste to my friends, they describe it as the most powerful attack with piss poor accuracy. A solid 85% of the time, I show them a complete miss that leaves them second guessing their friendship with me, but that remaining 15% is where the real heavy hitters come in. I still remember my friend proclaiming Wilderun the greatest thing to ever happen to music after showing him “The Unimaginable Zero Summer,” mere days after he said he wasn’t into prog.

But the secret is, this attack is also effective on me, too. When I comb through the new releases, there’s a low, low chance that anything sticks. Half the time, it’s usually from a band I already know. Then, there’s the even lower chance for that critical hit. That natural 20, just when I need it the most. In a late-night haze, I discovered Orgone’s Pleroma from a random Youtube recommendation, and it only took me the first few seconds to realize this was going to be something incredibly special.

When a death metal album starts with beautiful, dueling clean vocals, violin, and piano, you know it’s going to be great, but it’s what comes after that sold me on Pleroma: Instead of the typical, Opethian riffing you’d hear in many prog-death bands, Orgone opts for something you’d hear from the Gorguts playbook. This is, to my knowledge, the first album that fuses dissodeath-style riffing and songwriting with those beautiful, melodic breaks that prog-death is generally known for.

“Valley of the Locust” gave me whiplash when I first heard it, especially after getting lost within the trance-inducing intro. Stephen Jarrett treats his guitar more like a screaming violin, retaining much of the screechy-skronky riffage that makes this album special. I could hear the actual violin in the background, but it all seemed to get lost within the chaos at first. The five-ish minute mark gave me a break to try and decipher what I’d just listened to, with the death metal fading away to the album’s first chamber section.

As great as the first “real” track was, it was the stretch of “Hymne a la Beaute” to “Ubiquitous Divinity” where Pleroma really drew me in. Going full Aquilus and almost entirely eschewing death metal for the next eleven minutes, Orgone paint the most amazing sonic portrait with the use of their female vocalist (whose name I unfortunately can’t find anywhere) and their string instruments.

Like the aforementioned master of fusing black metal and classical, Orgone prove their serious chops in not just fusing genres together within this stretch of songs, but writing those genres seamlessly into their sound. Any of these songs could stand on their own, and the fact that they provide a nice break and segue into the nearly eighteen minute ‘Trawling the Depths’. 

While Pleroma is pretty massive at sixty-five minutes, I wouldn’t call it bloated in the slightest. That being said, it’s one dense album. It took me a few listens for things to truly sink in, and I have still barely parsed most of the album’s epics.

What’s even more incredible is the album managed to hold my attention after “Trawling the Depths.” Here I was thinking I was ready to throw in the towel until I realized the album’s finale and title track was almost over. And what an ending it has. It almost seems that the entire affair is building and building to that final, triumphant shout of “COLOR THE LIIIIIIIIGHT”, making it one of my favorite musical moments of the year and a serious contender for the coveted SOTY.

I had no clue that Orgone existed before this year, but this album is, without a doubt, one of the best thing’s I’ve heard all year. Scoring it is gonna be a bit tricky since while I know it’s incredible, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Pleroma has to offer. So, I score this conservatively with a caveat for the time being. This is likely to end up on my end of year list, and when it does, I think I’ll have a more concrete score then. Until then, I’ll just have to keep spinning this.

Recommended tracks: Please just listen to the whole thing
You may also like: Aquilus, Dessiderium, Lorem Ipsum
Final verdict: 9/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal-Archives page

Label: Independent

Orogne is:
– Andrew Ransom (Bass)
– Kent Wilson (Cello)
– Justin Wharton (Drums, precussion)

– Steven Jarrett (Guitars, vocals, keyboards)

The post Review: Orgone – Pleroma appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: instrumental prog metal, modern classical (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: X Japan, Ne Obliviscaris
Review by: Andy
Country: United States-New York
Release date: 15 September 2023

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer proclaimed that music is the noblest and highest of the arts: “music is not a representation of Ideas, but rather of the Will itself. Music and the world are expressions of the same metaphysical principle, the Will” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I implore any philosophically minded listeners to read that whole article, but Schopenhauer, bless his heart, never got to hear what a post-Dream Theater world sounded like. Hyper-intellectual technicality would surely fascinate old Arthur who lived in the time of the Romantics, and Haralabos Stafylakis is here to bridge the gap, the latest in a newly blossoming scene of equal parts classical and prog metal. 

Calibrating Friction deeply fuses the mechanics of both classical chamber orchestration and progressive metal such that the DNA of both is weaved into a quadruple helix. The eponymous opener includes abrupt, eight-string guitar prog metal, but also a clarinet and bassoon playing the main melodic line until Stafylakis abandons the metallic heft for delicate, contrapuntal strings and woodwinds before an increasingly intense, dramatic chamber section–reminiscent of Lorem Ipsum’s baroque screamo ensemble–crescendos through another metal section. Unlike a standard Nightwish clone, the metal here functions as an amplification of the classical rather than the orchestration reinforcing the metal, and the focus on metal’s rhythm and texture helps Stafylakis build dramatic tension that classical instruments alone cannot achieve–and vice versa for the orchestration’s delicacy. This is a chamber classical ensemble with metal timbre as much as–or more than–it is a prog metal album with orchestration.

Utilizing a star-studded guest list–including Raphael Weinroth-Browne (Leprous, Musk Ox) on cello, Javier Reyes on guitar (Mestís, Animals as Leaders), and Fung Chern Hwei on viola and violin (Seven)Suns)–Stafylakis quietly assembled a super team for this project, and each guest performs phenomenally, especially Reyes with his solo on “Flows Obsidian.” Every instrument on Calibrating Friction is mixed perfectly, the superb production far better than most metal albums including a staggering dynamic range that’s apparent listening: Calibrating Friction sounds superb as both the metal and classical sections are organic and full-bodied. Moreover, the collaborative nature of Calibrating Friction accentuates Stafylakis’ substantial writing ability as a JUNO-nominated composer, and the best moments are when several musical geniuses are working together under Stafylakis’ overarching vision. In fact, grabbing even more guests from across the prog world could possibly make another iteration of this project even cooler–I’m imagining a track like “Never the Same River” with Baard’s (Leprous) drumming injecting some crazy fills into the thrumming piano overtones.

“Never the Same River” has Stafylakis demonstrating the extent of his compositional achievements; several writing tricks, like using fighting string parts in the background while letting a single disembodied soloist tie the package together, work quite well for several minutes  at the start of the track, and when the metal bursts above the tasteful strings three minutes into the track, “Never the Same River” is elevated to new heights. The previously mentioned use of the lowest notes on the piano to provide a rumbling yet pretty bass is genius, as well. The album as a whole, though, would benefit from more adventurous songwriting. By that, I mean that Stafylakis often plays into a similar pattern of using the metal as an explosive release of tension while strings and winds alternate in building that conflict back up. Unfortunately, by the third or fourth track, this modulating intensity no longer works as well as it did at first, and this combination of instrumentation should allow for essentially limitless songwriting potential. Stafylakis could include more extended techniques–a stronger djent influence in a section or two, perhaps a bowed piano, or maybe some atypical singing style–or he could even implicate more instrumental variety with deep brass or something to elevate the chamber vibe into a full symphony. 

So while the composition is largely superb, Calibrating Friction feels like the debut it is at melding metal and classical, slightly timid at experimentation within the style and relying on the style itself being experimental enough on its own. But metal and classical should explode more forcefully, really inject a color palette impossible to imagine a few hundred years ago, and while the DNA of this project indicates the future potential, Stafylakis can do more with this style. He is undoubtedly close to something sublime, though, and I reckon with a couple tweaks, he could find that Schopenhauerian Will and achieve the highest form of the highest art. Stafylakis ought to continue in this direction because this style can change the course of prog metal and perhaps even music itself.

Recommended tracks: Calibrating Friction, Flows Obsidian, Never the Same River, Of Beauty / Of Brutality
You may also like: Lorem Ipsum, Gunter Wernö, Scarcity, Aquilus, Nick Vasallo, Casey Crescenzo, John Zorn, Seven)Suns, A.M.E.N. Raphael Weinroth Browne
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Label: independent

Haralabos Stafylakis is:
Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis – guitars and programming
Van Tilburg (Adam Pietrykowski) – guitars and electronics, guitar solos on “Of Beauty / Of Brutality”
Javier Reyes – guitar solos on “Flows Obsidian”
Matt Grou – drums and percussion
Vicky Chow – piano
Fung Chern Hwei – violin and viola
Raphael Weinroth-Browne – cello
Tristan Kasten-Krause – double bass on “Flows Obsidian”
Evan Runyon – double bass on “Of Beauty / Of Brutality”
Tara Helen O’Connor – flute, alto flute, and piccolo
Ken Thomson – clarinet and bass clarinet
Kathryn Brooks – bassoon
Eric Reed – French horn
William Keats Lang – trombone
Toby Kuhn – additional percussion

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