Style: Avant-garde, experimental, progressive metal, world music (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Igorrr, Wardruna, Eolya, Forndom
Country: Iceland
Release date: 14 July 2025

When you’re in the reviewing game long enough, it feels like you’ve seen it all. We’re within days of my third anniversary writing for The Progressive Subway, and 2025 feels like a wasteland. The blog is depressed by the lack of good new releases, the usual summer lull is hitting harder than ever, and I’m sifting through everything that’s available to review without enthusiasm. Insipid trad prog? No thanks. Uninspired prog rock? Not on your life. Middling djent debut? God, please smite me down. Sometimes you just feel that new releases no longer inspire you the way they did when you were a wide-eyed young reviewer with enthusiasm and hopes and dreams. If I employed a compass to point me to the interesting new releases, where would it take me?

Perhaps to Spaniard at large in the land of the ice and snow, Mario Infantes, formerly of baroque metal group Cult of Lilith, who has returned with a second solo effort, Bitácora (from the Spanish for binnacle: the casing for a ship’s compass). Exploring a range of moods and genres, Infantes melds a wealth of folk traditions with metal and symphonic influences, exploiting an ensemble of instruments from various countries in the process. The resulting concoction bears resemblances to his alma mater group, as well as the work of Igorrr, but utilises a rather different sonic palette. Singing in both Spanish and English (and quite possibly in other languages), Infantes leads the project as a multi-voiced, multilingual, multi-instrumentalist. He has a natural, operatic tendency, from Einar Solbergian high falsetto to resounding tenor, utilising Igorrr-esque harshes, layered choral harmonies, throat-singing (or close to it), and some more performative voice acting—moments of laughing, spoken word, even something akin to rap.

The instrumental bed, meanwhile, is a deft blend of metal instrumentation and folk instruments from around the world. Handpan features heavily, forming a raindrop dressing for the contemplation of ballad “Streams” and the Balkan lament “Notre Prison”, while a dissonant chiming gamelan underpins “Xhadhamtje”. At various other junctures, we hear from duduk (an Armenian double-reeded woodwind), bansuri (Indian bamboo flute), oud (Middle Eastern lute), zurna (double-reeded woodwind)¹, and doubtless more that my untrained ear failed to pick out. When the riffs come, they often have a rather loose structure, allowing Infantes to use them as an emphatic texture rather than as a restrictive rhythm that hampers the madness of his sonic science, perhaps best heard on “Cianuro”, where the riffs constantly morph, rarely repeating a measure. The resulting concoction is international yet seamless; while a particular section might sound Indonesian or Spanish or Eastern European, the totality seems borderless, the creation of a citizen of nothing smaller than the world itself. 

“Xhadhamtje” is probably the most avant-garde swing on the album with Infantes’ throaty keening and a palimpsest of sinister whispers and nightmare sounds ala Ecophony Rinne, giving way to an enormous operatic crescendo with help from shrieking guest vocalist, Stirga, and an eruption into metal riffs, all underpinned by a nightmarish windchime motif. “Muharib Alqifaar” opens with zurna, Phrygian wails and mysterious oud picking, before exploding into heavier and heavier riffs, and while the coda of Spanish rap feels tacked on, it’s mostly a very successful journey through Bitácora’s various modes. Closing epic, “Cianuro”, operates similarly: a nine-minute distillation of Infantes’ various idiosyncrasies, from balladic crooning sections to upsurges of manic metal. In these heavier moments, the guitar tone and prominence of the bass in the mix, as well as some of the operatic tendencies and manic harshes, have more than a whiff of Igorrr about them, but Infantes owns his sound for himself.

Indeed, it’s in his restraint that this is most apparent: “Sírenu” largely consists of Infantes and an oud with strings before its orchestral crescendo and a gorgeous guest performance from Sunna Friðjónsdóttir. “Away” relies heavily on handpan, much like “Streams” before it, growing inexorably toward a cathartically rhythmic, ritualistic chant. “Streams” is probably the most accessible track on the album, the swelling strings in its chorus proving genuinely stirring. Infantes excels at giving each track a distinct personality of its own, and intersperses the more experimental and heavy sojourns with calming palate cleansers; the softer moments are, perhaps, the album highlight, their meditativeness and sublimity proving a soothing palliative. 

As Bitácora closes with its conclusive coda of lo-fi flamenco and scatting, it’s hard not to feel like you’ve just returned from some astrally projected existential journey and come to at the corner table of a Spanish bar; after such a unique sonic adventure, it feels necessary to sit contemplatively for a minute or two. Certainly, Infantes is a remarkable musician and composer. And while the avant-garde scene can be demanding, and not every swing here lands, far more hit the mark than in the average work of this genre. Far too often, experimental composers throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, leaving listeners with an all too disjointed affair. But Bitácora manages that rare thing: an evocative, flowing listen with peaks and valleys, genuine emotion, and moments like a sonic punch in the face. A much-needed reminder that there are always innovative artists plugging away at their craft, and it’s nice when the compass leads you straight to them. 

Recommended tracks: Streams, Sírenu, Cianuro
You may also like: Maud the Moth, Evan Carson, Elend, Ivar Bjørnson & Einar Selvik
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Label: Lost Future Records – Bandcamp | Official Website

Mario Infantes is:
– Mario Infantes (vocals)

With guests:
– Hrafnkell Örn Guðjónsson (Drums)
– Yara Polana (acoustic guitar)
– Gísli Gunnarsson (additional orchestration)
– Ásgeir Ásgeirsson (Oud)
– Sunna Friðjónsdóttir (additional vocals)
– Živa Ivadóttir (additional vocals)
– Simon Thorolfsson, (guitar on Obsidian I)
– Samúel Örn Böðvarsson (Bass)
– Daniel Þór Hannesson (guitars)
– Sebas Bautista (additional guitars)
– Tayebeh jourbonyan (additional vocals)
– Erik Qvick (additional percussion)

1. Infantes’ Instagram page has lots of great little videos where he demonstrates these instruments and talks a bit about them. ︎

The post Review: Mario Infantes – Bitácora appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, Pain of Salvation, Redemption
Country: International
Release date: 11 July 2025

If you’re a band with a certain amount of cache within the scene, you can probably find at least one reviewer who’ll give you a positive blurb. Some of the lowest scoring bands we’ve ever reviewed have garnered 10/10s from a spate of outlets we’ve never heard of and who may or may not accept payment in exchange for positive press (unfortunately, such cynical industries do exist). Now, I’m not accusing Philosophobia of any such thing, but to the brag on their Bandcamp that their self-titled debut was given “numerous… 10 out of 10 reviews,” I can safely say: we weren’t one of them. Our erstwhile colleague Nick was obviously feeling especially mean when he bestowed a dismal 2/10 on the upstart supergroup. A rival review blog, who I won’t name, claim of the band’s sophomore release, “if Dream Theater thought they had 2025’s Progressive honours all-sewn-up with the Parasomina [sic] album, then Philosophobia might just have rained on their parade.” Well, as self-proclaimed haters, we gave Parasomnia a 6.5/10, so this’ll be an interesting one to tease apart.  

Joining the ranks of albums whose art depicts people with unexpected things where their brains should be, The Constant Void sees Philosophobia return with their edgy take on trad prog. Clearly rooted in the trappings of such 90s luminaries as Dream Theater, Pain of Salvation (Kristoffer Gildenlöw was bassist on their debut), and even shades of Symphony X, how can the European group stand apart in a scene clogged with bands getting dubious 10 out of 10s from unknown outlets?

After a scene-setting intro—echoing voices, sirens, doomy synths, a portentous voiceover about death—via the creatively titled “Intro”, we’re treated to a trad prog riff that sounds, much like every riff in the scene for the last twenty years, like a watered down “Panic Attack”. Utilising some harsher barks and gifted with a catchy hook, “King of Fools” may well be the heaviest and most energetic song on The Constant Void. Instrumentally, Philosophobia showcase a nigh problematic knowledge of the expected tropes as well as the talent to play them. Riffs like that of “The Forgotten Part I” struggle for identity, and solos are performed with aplomb but are unlikely to stick in the mind—it all feels somewhat by the numbers, if well-performed. Drummer Alex Landenburg (Kamelot, Mekong Delta) is the record’s most valuable player, his performance dynamic and energetic, cruising through enlivening changes in feel, and magnetic grooves that elevate the more lacklustre sections. 

Tying it all together is vocalist Domenik Papaemmanouil who possesses a rather nice timbre, but too often ends up straining himself beyond his own capabilities, leaning into an overwrought and somewhat pained mode of delivery. Requisite ballad “Will You Remember” showcases the problem elegantly, with Papaemmanouil exercising rather elegant restraint in the verses, only to sound like he’s doing his level best to cultivate laryngeal polyps during the choruses. For the bulk of the record, he tends towards this overwrought, overcompensatory delivery and it’s something of a chore to endure. Every mellower moment is a respite for the listener and, presumably, for Papaemmanouil’s voicebox, too. 

Nevertheless, with all this in mind, Philosophobia aren’t without talent and they attempt a few different ideas on The Constant Void with varying levels of success. “Inside His Room” plays with wide open chords and a fun lead guitar motif. “F 40.8” allows the musicians to let loose in a madcap instrumental piece (and allows us to hear Sebastian Heuckmann’s bass work, which is most audible here and somewhat buried on most other tracks), but the rhythmic bed is rather uninspired, despite Landenburg’s efforts to add variety. Twenty minute epic “The Forgotten Part II” trots out all the prog cliches: a grandiose choral opening, brooding 90s synths, harsh vocal sections, a piano etude, and a lengthy reprise of Part I’s chorus. Some ideas are less successful. “Underneath Grassroots” forgoes percussion entirely, centring Papaemmanouil over gentle guitarwork and a somewhat incongruous synth solo, but the song comes off half-baked. Meanwhile, “The Forgotten Part I” has a gothy chorus repeated ad nauseam broken up only by a somewhat ill-fitting, frenetic solo section. Many of the tonal ideas are hard to parse, such as the triumphal instrumental section that bifurcates the balladeering on “Will You Remember” (amazingly, the mawkish vocal sample manages to be far more endearing than most).

What’s odd about listening to The Constant Void is how Philosophobia manage to demonstrate clear talent and illustrate clear performance issues simultaneously. Take the epic solo on “The Fall”. Guitarist Andreas Ballnus opens with almost Gilmourian emotion slowly amping up the complexity, the rhythm remaining judiciously restrained all the while. The solo falters when an out of tune double-tracked guitar harmony interrupts the flow, followed by a cringe-inducingly uncanny tremolo section¹, after which we segue into a pleasingly Rudessian piano solo which allows keyboardist Tobias Weißgerber to really shine. Sandwiched within an absolute album highlight is a bafflingly amateurish double whammy of jarring audio choices. The artless transition from the piano etude to the heavy riff on “The Forgotten Part II” is another such moment which makes your ears prick up, the lunk, ill-timed abruptness of it proving a jolt to the listener. I’ve focused on the negatives a lot here so I want to reiterate that these guys are really talented performers; their sins boil down to a slightly overcooked vocal performance, a lack of memorability, and the odd mistake. Taken together, that’s a surprisingly marring combination.

When Parasomnia dropped, it became apparent that Dream Theater were cannibalising their own discography for ideas and falling into self-parody in the process, presenting a dull simulacrum of their own zeniths. The Constant Void feels similarly troubled but for very different reasons. Struggling to break free of their influences, to bring inspired riffs and melodies, and still prone to some amateurish errors, it feels like a better album is yearning to break free from this frustratingly unpolished one. Nevertheless, unlike Dream Theater, Philosophobia’s best days are still ahead of them, and a bit of focus and polish could take them the extra distance. None of this is making the next press release, is it?

Recommended tracks: King of Fools, Will You Remember, The Fall
You may also like: Pyramid Theorem, Need, Aeon Zen, Vicinity
Final verdict: 5/10

1. My colleague Cooper, who possesses much more guitar-tech know-how than I, adds that the guitars in the double-tracked section are both panned in the centre rather than one to the right speaker and one to the left. This means that a slight discrepancy in tuning, which you can hear vestiges of prior to the double-tracked section, becomes emphasised by the production choices. Of the tremolo section, he suspects it’s been quantised; that is, digitally altered so the picking is of a completely uniform speed, making it sound uncanny. ︎

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Metal-Archives

Label: The Laser’s Edge – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Philosophobia is:
– Domenik Papaemmanouil – Vocals
– Andreas Ballnus – Guitars
– Alex Landenburg – Drums
– Sebastian Heuckmann – Bass
– Tobias Weißgerber – Keys

The post Review: Philosophobia – The Constant Void appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

– 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.

Style: Progressive rock, progressive metal (mostly clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Haken, prog rock Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Riverside
Country: Norway
Release date: 13 June 2025

What do you know about America’s tenth president, John Tyler? I’m willing to bet the answer is ‘not much.’ Succeeding William Henry Harrison, who died a month after his own inauguration, Tyler’s leadership was mocked for the unorthodox—and, at the time, unprecedented—way he had come to power. Fearful of alienating political allies, he kept his predecessor’s cabinet despite the fact many of them actively disliked him. At the same time, he took stances in such flagrant opposition to his own party’s platform that they tried to impeach him. Generally regarded as an unremarkable president with a few minor achievements to his name, he carries the ignominious honour of being the only president whose death wasn’t officially recognised in Washington (because of his allegiance to the Confederacy). You haven’t heard of him because historical memory rewards the noteworthy, be they good or bad. The John Tylers of history tend to be forgotten. 

Vying for the title of “the John Tyler of prog” comes Norwegian outfit Avkrvst with their sophomore effort Waving at the Sky. Like their peers in Altesia and Moon Machine, Avkrvst’s sound sits somewhere between prog rock-era Opeth and early Haken with splashes of Porcupine Tree and Riverside for good measure, straddling that thin marigold line between prog rock and prog metal. If my memory serves me correctly, we didn’t end up covering their 2022 debut The Approbation because the writer who had opted to review them suddenly left the site. If that sounds like an inauspicious start for Avkrvst in our dank, poorly-lit halls, then I’m afraid all that talk of John Tyler up top isn’t a harbinger of any improvement.

Instrumental opener “Preceding” gives a flavour of things to come: wonky time signatures and staccato riffing plus melodic lead guitar and synth lines backed by whimsical Mellotron. Like so many intro tracks, it adds little to the overall album. At least follow-up “The Trauma” gives us some galloping drums and a tension-building riff to feast on before presenting Waving at the Sky’s predominant issue which, like the band, we’ll avoid for a hot minute. Tracks like “Families are Forever”¹ and “Conflating Memories” offer us some melodic, almost Floydian guitar solos, the latter also featuring a spicy flute cameo, while a couple of synth leads adorn “Waving at the Sky”. “Ghosts of Yesteryear” offers an adrenaline booster of much-needed energy with strong riffing and energetic drumwork. Indeed, the rhythm section in particular excels throughout the record, with the low-tuned, Yes-inspired bass work (credited to both Simon Bergseth and Øystein Aadland) thrumming pleasingly in the mix at all times, and the energetic drumming of Martin Utby being the most obvious plumes in Avkrvst’s cap. 

These better angels of Avkrvst’s nature, however, are the exception rather than the rule. It takes Waving at the Sky five minutes to introduce the vocals, and when they do arrive you can see why the band filibustered with instrumental prevarication. There’s no sugar-coating the fact that Simon Bergseth’s vocal performance is bland². He invariably sticks to safe, tried-and-tested vocal lines, singing whole notes in a barely varying cadence and with a near-total lack of expression. Every note is extended long beyond the point at which any interest could be maintained and he never varies from this mode of delivery. Harsh vocals are used sparingly, which is for the best because they’re always superfluous to the band’s sound; Avkrvst don’t need them, and they hang awkwardly every time. 

“Families are Forever” is by far the worst offender in this vein. In practice, the restrained instrumental work, the low burr of the bass and the nuance of the drumwork, is perfect for this sort of track. But Bergseth’s utterly lifeless vocal melodies, which should be the focal point of this section, instead rob the song of any intrigue. And this happens every time, the band members almost sabotage themselves in trying to match the soporific quality of the vocals. Historically, I haven’t been all that kind to Ross Jennings’ guest appearances (will his turn on the upcoming Scardust change that track record?), and I’m hardly going to start now, but his cliched and rather unremarkable contribution to “The Malevolent” is leaps and bounds ahead of any other vocal performance on this record. Whatever mitochondrial deficit the band were suffering from heretofore briefly abates and the band finally finds some damned energy which certainly helps “The Malevolent” as well as Jennings’ chances to steal the show.

That same energy rears its head a few times and always sees Avkrvst at their most compelling. “Ghosts of Yesteryear” features some sick bass, animated drumming, and big guitar chords all with a flavour of Porcupine Tree’s iconic “Deadwing”. Strong riffing and an ominous lead motif with an almost saxy timbre all make for a standout track—like John Tyler’s annexation of Texas, it’s probably their greatest achievement on the record. Naturally, the vocal-led sections are still a dirge, but the band at least manage to vary the track enough to keep it interesting. Twelve minute closer “Waving at the Sky” possesses a certain portentousness absent from the rest of the record, and the sense of a compositional goal in mind. With a wealth of solos and ominous riffing in its instrumental back half, it’s hardly surprising that it’s one of the better tracks. But the track also features a moderately interesting chorus. That may sound like damning with faint praise—probably because it is—but on a record with vocal performances this expressionless, moderate intrigue is a win. 

Ultimately proving as insipid as its title, Waving at the Sky contains flashes of compositional talent and energy in an album that, for the most part, has a contrarian tendency to be uninteresting in spite of the obvious potential that occasionally rears its head. And yet, I don’t want to sound too harsh; Avkrvst’s main sin is John Tyler-style blandness, not James Buchanan-esque badness. A focus on strengthening and varying vocal melodies in a way that matches the rest of the band’s talents would provide a much-needed shot of energy to the compositions. Then again, why should Avkrvst listen to me? After all, a certain president never listened to his haters³. Can you guess which one?

Recommended tracks: Ghosts of Yesteryear, Conflating Memories
You may also like: Altesia, Moon Machine, Keor, Novena
Final verdict: 5/10

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

Label: InsideOutMusic – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Avkrvst is:
– Simon Bergseth (lead vocalist, guitars, bass guitar)
– Martin Utby (drums, synthesizer)
– Øystein Aadland (bass guitar, keyboards)
– Edvard Seim (guitars)
– Auver Gaaren (keyboards)

1.  You know who might have something to say about this song title? John Tyler! He was both the first president to lose his wife in office and the first to get married in office (to his second wife). Woodrow Wilson would later become the second and only other president to become both widowed and remarried while in office. ︎
2.  Unlike John Tyler, who reportedly had a rather pleasant singing voice and could play many instruments. Given how much everyone seemed to dislike him, we can assume he really must’ve been quite good. ︎
3.  “My own personal popularity can have no influence over me when the dictates of my best judgment and the obligations of an oath require of me a particular course. Under such circumstances, whether I sink or swim on the tide of popular favor is, to me, a matter of inferior consideration.” God, what a bore.  ︎

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Style: Progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Black Crown Initiate, Textures, early The Contortionist
Country: Minnesota, USA
Release date: 6 June 2025

Retooling. If you’re the sort of person who assiduously watches sitcoms from their first season, you’ll be familiar with retooling. It’s the process by which a TV show is changed in order to alter a faulty premise into a more successful one, often by removing or adding a character, or changing the tone. Perhaps the most familiar example to my generation would be Parks and Recreation, which was retooled in its second season from a snarky The Office replica into a more heartwarming and slightly cartoonishly humoured show with the introduction of two new characters to incite tensions, both sexual and financial. Other famous examples include Star Trek (the entire cast of the initial pilot was replaced), Dallas (after killing off major character Bobby Ewing, the show suffered a catastrophic nose-dive in ratings and decided to reintroduce dead Bobby by revealing the entire season was a dream), and, of course, Family Matters. Starting out as a blue-collar take on The Cosby Show, Family Matters became completely restructured around the initial one-time character of Steve Urkell (‘did I do that?’) and subsequently turned, as Key and Peele put it, ‘into goddamn Quantum Leap.’¹

Minnesotan outfit Giant’s Knife are arguably the Parks and Recreation of prog metal, changing tone a little with the help of two new characters. Their 2021 debut Oracle was a fully instrumental work with a post-djent flavour; heavy riffs but with a melodic focus, with a strong emphasis on flow. On sophomore At the End of All Things, alongside the founding trio (Austin, Rylan, and Tony), the band have found their very own financial and sexual tension-makers in the form of Kyle and Will who both provide guitar work—while Kyle and Rylan unleash the clean and harsh vocals. Will audiences welcome the new cast or are they destined for cancellation after just two seasons, ala every single Netflix show post-2017?

Opening with a nod to their past, the five minute instrumental opener “Wayfarer” provides a throughline from Oracle, contextualising Giant’s Knife new shtick within the evolution of their sound. At the End of All Things truly begins with “Beyond the Reach of Comets” where the vocals finally get to walk on to cheers from the live-studio audience, showcasing the new range of metalcore barks, death growls, and soaring chorus cleans. It turns out that Giant’s Knife with vocals sound more like Textures, and, in the softer moments, like The Contortionist. With stronger production and those harshes guiding them, Giant’s Knife also sound newtons heavier, often veering into the djentrified progressive death stylings of Black Crown Initiate or even, to my ear, Whitechapel. 

Soft harmonies befitting the likes of The Contortionist or Tesseract perforate many of the tracks, such as the refrains of “Godfall” and “Beyond the Reach of Comets”; with the atmospheres of interlude “Loading…” and synthy outro palette cleanser “Null” occupying a similar sonic space to the aforementioned bands. “Where Souls Lie Still” almost verges on post-hardcore akin to The Safety Fire with its more anthemic sensibility. These moments are always done, just like the best sitcom comedies, with a powerful sense of tension and release.

Over time, however, we inevitably end up hitting on the usual plot beats and tropes that hold an otherwise promising cast back: the open low-string breakdowns that infect “Beyond the Reach of Comets”, a tendency to stick to a similar tempo for most songs, and the usual filler djent riffs that feel a little lazy, such as the one that plagues “Godfall”. For the most part, these issues are at least interwoven into compositions which tend to evolve over the course of songs, and rarely linger too long on a single idea; clearly part of the legacy of starting out instrumental and needing to keep the compositions moving. By the time the lumbering outro riff of “Molten Core” hits its nadir, you really do feel like you’ve hit the void. Meanwhile, “Destined Death” pushes the instrumental work in the ‘faces in the sky’ section to a delicious extreme, the vocal delivery providing a throughline while the kit is pulverised ever more intensely and the riffs become more frenetic. When Giant’s Knife hit upon an epic clean section or push the complexity of the instruments to further extremes they find their best pay-offs. At other times, like a sitcom where everything has to return to normal by the end, the audience leaves entertained but without memorable moments to hold in their mind. 

At a svelte thirty-nine minutes, At the End of All Things runs a tad longer than the average sitcom, but the retooling has put a good show on a new path, one guaranteed to find the Minnesotan five-piece a larger audience. With slightly stronger writing, a willing fanbase, and maybe a guest spot from Henry Winkler, Giant’s Knife’s promising fresh start could blossom into something truly brilliant. Let’s hope they get renewed for a third season. 

Recommended tracks: Beyond the Reach of Comets, Godfall, Where Souls Lie Still
You may also like: Rannoch, Subterranean Lava Dragon
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Independent

Giant’s Knife is:
– Austin (guitars, programming)
– Kyle (guitars, vocals)
– Will (guitars)
– Rylan (bass, vocals)
– Tony (drums)

1. “I’m a fuckin’ actor, Gene, I’ve done more cocaine than you weigh, motherfucker!” ︎

The post Review: Giant’s Knife – At the End of All Things appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Post-metal, post-black metal, blackgaze
Recommended for fans of: Messa, Oceans of Slumber, Suldusk
Country: Norway
Release date: 23 May 2025

There are, it seems, two kinds of post-metal, which can be neatly divided into the kind that bores me and the kind that interests me. The genre inherited the entrenched ideal of build and crescendo that defines much of the more uninteresting post-rock out there—Mogwai to Pelican, Explosions in the Sky to Amenra—centering a compositional conceit over giving the music a sense of purpose beyond its structure. On the other hand, you’ve got the more dynamic post- acts who dare to insert outside influences and build on the genre’s foundational precepts to create something more, which is how we get to the likes of Talk Talk to Bruit ≤, The Ocean to M​ú​r. Notions of genre purity are unnecessarily limiting, the post- genres are better when they get weird with it.

Fortunately, on debut Man Under Erasure, Norwegian quintet Feversea are melding post-metal and post-black influences with occasional hints of sludge and doom. Led by the airy, haunting vocals of Ada Lønne Emberland, the band sit firmly between the lighter blackened stylings of Suldusk, the creative post-metal of Messa, and the melodic doomy leanings of Oceans of Slumber. Thick riffs vie with blackened tremolo while occasional blast beats and banshee screams cut through the languid clean vocals that dominate throughout.

After a quick introductory track featuring whispered male vocals over an arpeggiated synth motif, “Murmur Within the Skull of God” gets the ball rolling with a blackened sludgy riff that forms an indefatigable foundation for Emberland’s almost disdainful delivery, the track eventually capitulating to blast beats and screams. “New Creatures Replace Our Names” follows that same structural pattern, with an intense blackened mid-section after a delicious slow-build and a compelling ascending riff, but the rest of the song is rooted in a more doomy milieu reminiscent of Oceans of Slumber. This is the general formula of Man Under Erasure, by no means adhered to rigidly, but representative of the record’s tenor.

The problem with a lot of emergent post-metal bands is their lack of dynamism, a willingness to trudge along at the same tempo for fifty minutes. Thankfully, Feversea’s wider range of influences get the metronome working overtime, as with the fevered blackened punk of “Until it Goes Away” which, its energy spent, spends its latter half in keening lament. Meanwhile, “Decider” with its rather gothic, almost ritualistic intro gives way to a thick bass riff over incessant blasts, eventually exploding into quasi-mathcore freneticism ala Rolo Tomassi. Simultaneously, outside of these moments, much of the rest of the track is a dead-ringer for recent Dreadnought, particularly the epic instrumental outro. Feversea contain multitudes. 

Closer “Kindred Spirit” leans further into the post-black influences, opening with a lengthy instrumental section which centres tremolo picking and unrelenting blasts. The move towards a doomier pace and emphasis on vocal harmonies thereafter recalls the more recent work of Dreadnought, probably Feversea’s closest match in style. “Sunkindling”, despite its brevity, is perhaps the most unique track. Centred around a defiant chug, a palimpsest of vocal layers form a subtle-yet-apocalyptic backing choir bestowing a much more epic quality, and yet an instrumental wall-of-sound constantly threatens to drown out the voice of the collective. The production, clear and capacious, allows the comparative weightiness of this track’s choices to really shine; the dynamic contrast between Feversea’s inherent sonic chiaroscuro is prioritised by the production for the better. Nevertheless, this is one of few moments to truly wow; it’s the moments that stand against the post-metal and post-black foundations that see Feversea at their best, but these aren’t enough to define tracks.

Demonstrating an intimate and accomplished understanding of the trappings of the genre, Feversea show a great deal of promise here. Whilst the band’s promise of “incorporating influences from neofolk and post-punk” feels a touch overstated, lacking the more overt swings of Messa’s latest, it’s nevertheless the daring to incorporate outside influences that makes Man Under Erasure. Perhaps the trap of pedestrian post-metal hasn’t been fully shorn, but Feversea are at no risk of being erased.

Recommended tracks: Sunkindling, Decider, Until It Goes Away
You may also like: Dreadnought, Huntsmen
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Dark Essence Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Feversea is:
– Isak Lønne Emberland (guitar)
– Ada Lønne Emberland (vocals)
– Alexander Lange (guitars)
– Jeremie Malezieux (drums)
– Aleksander Johnsen Solberg (bass)

The post Review: Feversea – Man Under Erasure appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Post-classical, ambient folk, experimental, a cappella (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Caroline Shaw, Roomful of Teeth, Philip Glass
Country: Sweden
Release date: 25 April 2025

The term “solastalgia” describes the mental distress caused by the changing of one’s home environment and the inability to prevent that change. It can manifest as climatic change, loss of species, rampant urbanisation, or any number of other alterations, but what it speaks to is a uniquely modern sense of grief. The inability of governments to tackle climate change is multifactorial—greed, stupidity, and denial are all in the mix—but perhaps the most important reason is the sheer incomprehensibility of the task. The unhelpful moniker ‘global warming’ belied the complexity of the phenomenon; the average temperature rises, yes, but the effects are instability, chaos. We are living through a manmade extinction event; the 1.9 million species on Earth we have identified are estimated to comprise a mere 0.1% of the species actually alive—scientists believe anywhere between an average of 24 to 150 species go extinct per day. Such a monumental catastrophe is beyond the powers of any human to comprehend, and so our grief is elliptical, localised, it intrudes upon us in banal guises, knifelike thoughts piercing consciousness at unexpected junctures. 

I doubt that Rebekka Karijord would object to being characterised as suffering from solastalgia. The Swedish artist, composer, and producer has worked on film soundtracks as well as her own solo material, and my first exposure to her was with the original soundtrack she composed for the documentary Songs of Earth with the London Contemporary Orchestra. (a male ʻōʻō in Kaua’i singing to a mate that would never hear him never join the duet the last of his species and now extinct) For that project, Karijord experimented with orchestral mimicry, attempting to emulate natural sounds like running water and melting glaciers via instruments. To her latest work, The Bell Tower, she brings that same experimental ethos. (your father scrubbing at stubborn insect splatters on the fenders a Pollock-esque invertebrate morgue as he washes the car something you’ve never done as there are so few insects now) Named for the Rainier Maria Rilke poem ‘Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower’, this mournful, anthropocene work centres on the human voice. Karijord used specialist recording equipment to record the voices of twenty-five singers, and then built a sampling instrument to manipulate these voices and her own, and turn them, as such, into her instruments. (terrestrial species are migrating an average of 17 km per decade marine species around 70 km towards the poles in order to escape rising ocean temperatures) Karijord herself takes lead vocal duties for some tracks, and is joined by choral group Roomful of Teeth, but every other sound and “instrument” on this album is made by the manipulated vocals of Karijord’s digitised army, and so, albeit in a slightly unusual sense, the entire record is a cappella.

“Lacrimosa” opens with a mission statement, sampling a speech by the poet and philosopher Joanna Macy in which she talks about the need to offer gratitude to the things we’re losing: “how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy?” (humanity is a geological event which will be measurable in the strata millions of years from now will we be akin to the Permian extinction) Mournful human voices swell ambiently beneath the speech, building to a complex choral counterpoint as Macy’s speech ends. The voices, wielded like uncanny instruments, almost hellish in their tones, transform into undulating sirens and a persistent foreboding rasp heralding the environmental emergency before us. (the sea ice at Halley Bay thawed early in 2016 and 2017 collapsing under the weight of the nesting emperor penguins thousands of chicks drowned too young too weak to swim to endure the icy not icy enough sea) “Lacrimosa” gives a strong flavour of the various ways Karijord utilises the vocal samples, varying from overtly vocal-like noises to ambient textures to mimicking extant instruments. 

Some songs are more conventional: “Sanctuary” feels more of apiece with Karijord’s art pop origins and sees her take the lead with Roomful of Teeth harmonising in a simple verse-chorus structure. The ecological grief continues as she questions, “my daughter, have the springs gone silent / will you ever dare to have a child / or has the ocean reached your doorstep / and the sun turned hostile?” (my grandparents would recall six feet snowdrifts how extreme the winters were but it no longer snows a dusting at most perhaps cold but never snow it’s simply too dry) “A City by the Sea” contemplates a toxic sea with Karijord leading solo as samples pulse monotonously behind and the choir provide a textural polyrhythm, ending with a harmonised chant of “oh, let them take me now”. (approximately 25% of US congress representatives are climate deniers) Meanwhile, “Serenade”, a paean to nature and a yearning for transformation, uses vocal samples sparingly for a strings effect. The hauntingly muffled vocals in the mid-section recall a similar effect I’ve only ever heard on Ulver’s Shadows of the Sun, a similarly haunted and funereal record. 

Karijord pushes the post-classical influences further on a couple of tracks, notably “You, Mountain” and “9th Duino Elegy” both of which centre around madrigal vocal arrangements. (in 2016 the Siberian permafrost thawed to reveal a frozen reindeer corpse containing anthrax infecting twenty people and killing one boy as well as two-thousand reindeer) The former is possessed of a percussive quality, a number of syncopated voices moving in and out of synchrony in bursts of four before moving into a sample-driven section that segues into ambient registers, allowing Karijord to take the lead. The latter is a rather traditional madrigal arrangement between Karijord and Roomful of Teeth with multiple harmonies singing in counterpoint, lifting lyrics from the Rilke poem of the same name. (rainbows glisten on sand they lure me in close until I gag every inch of skin ripples twitching inhaling toxic gas I’m choking) This, alongside “Lacrimosa”, is one of the more arresting pieces on the album, a haunted elegy to the earth and our transient lives upon it. 

These more fully-formed pieces are punctuated by shorter, quasi-interludinal works. These tracks usually build layers of voices in almost post-rock fashion to a climactic volume before peeling back. (28% of all assessed species are considered to be endangered and at least 55% are vulnerable) “Fugue” bestows upon the vocal samples an almost brassier tone with higher raindrop voice-synths splashing with Poissonian abandon; “Megafauna Pt.1” opts for a lone synth and a desolate wind to evoke some lifeless tundra; and “Earth”¹ is a peel of plaintive voices ringing out against the terrible void. Unfortunately, these pieces are relatively simple experiments with vocal samples which feel a little undercooked and their congregation in the record’s second half weakens the album a little. (areas of India Australia northern South America Central Africa and the Middle East are set to become uninhabitable within the next twenty-five years as temperatures soar to unlivable levels) They lack the experimental qualities that make “Lacrimosa” such a highlight, or the focal lead work of Karijord and her collaborators to ground them in a stronger sense of identity. The closing piece, “Vespera”, another more interludinal piece, is more successful for its placement, a fully choral requiem which, in its final moments, features a sound like trilling birds settling into the canopy as dusk falls. (mourners clad in black gather around the glacier a frozen monolith turned to a puddle and a plaque with an inscription: This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.) The longer sojourns on The Bell Tower demonstrate its greatest strengths allowing increased time for structural variation, evolution of ideas, and pushing the sample machine to stranger ends. 

The most powerful weapon humans have is our voice. Our ability to communicate, to justify terrible things, to agree to deals with other humans, to collaborate in building grand designs, to stamp our mark irrevocably on the planet, it all begins with the voice. It’s the murder weapon we’ve stabbed into the heart of nature, which makes for a terrible irony when it’s the very same thing we use to grieve our crime. Karijord’s anthropocentric requiem is a salve, something to ease the grief through shared acknowledgement. The Bell Tower demands to be listened to in the balm of pre-morning twilight with Macy’s exhortation on our mind, with gratitude and sorrow. When the sun rises, we must act. 

Recommended tracks: Lacrimosa, Sanctuary, 9th Duino Elegy
You may also like: Galya Bisengalieva, Courtney Swain
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | YouTube | Instagram

Label: Bella Union – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Rebekka Karijord is:
– Rebekka Karijord (vocals, sampling)
With guests:
– Roomful of Teeth (vocals)

1. “Earth” struck me as being rather similar in style to David Crosby’s “I’d Swear There Was Somebody Here”, written in an almost hallucinatory state and dedicated to his girlfriend Christine Hinton who was killed in a car accident. ︎

Bibliography:  

• The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan
• The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
• What the Wild Sea Can Be by Helen Scales
• Lyrics (“Rainbows glisten on sand…”) taken from “Way Too Long” by Bent Knee
• Data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature
• Probably some other stuff I Googled and forgot about.

The post Review: Rebekka Karijord – The Bell Tower appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: progressive metal (instrumental) 
Recommended for fans of: Plini, Arch Echo, David Maxim Micic
Country: Ohio, USA
Release date: 18 April 2025

“What happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Oh come on, I know you know what I’m talking about. Legos were simple. Something happened out here while I was inside. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I mean, I’m not saying it’s bad, I just wanna know what happened.” – Professor Marshall Kane in Community. 

The words of the brooding Michael K. Williams character above may resonate with older readers who remember the days before Lego fascism. The Lego experience used to be one of freedom, of having a box bursting at the seams with mismatched blocks and letting one’s mind run wild to build monstrosities whose awful angularities and obvious structural issues were patched over using the naivety of childhood imagination. In the modern era, Lego is a rigidly enforced building experience complete with instruction manuals that should never be deviated from. One can think of music the same way, with genre tropes, certain instruments, and even effects and tones as a similar set of building blocks that can be utilised to create wondrous new imaginings, or the same thing you’ve heard a thousand times before. 

Lux Terminus’ debut was hailed as something of a gem in the instrumental scene. With piano as the main event, the Ohian trio separate themselves from the bulk of instrudjental acts by reining in the wankery, centring piano and synth and using a much softer production style. Vikram Shankar’s keyboarding is the main driving force, and he’s backed by Brian Craft’s thrumming basscraft, and Matthew Kerschner’s mix of electronic and acoustic drumwork. Sophomore Cinder is opened by the “Jupiter” triptych which sees Lux Terminus accompanied by the melismatic la-ing and ah-ing of backing vocal trio Espera (Paige Phillips, Mathilda Riley, Lynsey Ward). A recurring motif of grand synth textures is interwoven between an irreverent staccato rhythm, spoken word, and some ambient atmospheres. A bog-standard djent rhythm closes out “Jupiter II: To Bend a Comet” in dirging fashion. The third part throws it back to Espera, who boldly diverge from la’s and ah’s, adding some oh-ing to their repertoire with swelling symphonics to really hammer home the grandeur. And… that’s it. We’re twelve minutes into Cinder and all we’ve heard is a two-minute album intro idea grotesquely swollen to a medically concerning length. It’s an inauspicious opening to say the least.

Unfortunately, Cinder continues just as unpromisingly. Across the album, Lux Terminus are plagued by a puzzling adherence to a banal formula which fails to serve the talents of the band members. Drawing from a handful of compositional building blocks—synthwave textures, djent rhythms, a piano or synth solo, restrained atmosphere-led sections—and proceeding in Lego-like fashion to build songs. “Mosaic Mind” offers some intricate piano work in the verses, some eighties synthwave textures and flows through a range of soundscapes until a glorious key change. “Neon Rain” centres the djent, performed both on piano and bass, returning to its main motif ad nauseam. “P.L.O.N.K.” sounds like a Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack on half speed, utilising relatively simple chords for its epic main melody and with the synth lead and piano rhythm playing in counterpoint. The ideas are there but they’re repeated and reiterated in slightly different forms across Cinder; the same few Lego bricks in slightly different configurations. Even a few tracks in, the instruction manual Lux Terminus are cribbing from is readily apparent to all. 

The proof of this comes when people with more imagination join in. Guests Ross Jennings (Haken), Jon Pyres (Threads of Fate), and itinerant sax virtuoso Jørgen Munkeby (Shining) put in an appearance on “Catalyst”, which is the album highlight. Munkeby’s ubiquitous sax provides an engaging hook; Jennings naturally bestows an Affinity-era Haken sensibility to the track; and Pyres is an intriguing melodic foil for him. “Catalyst” is no more interestingly composed than any of the other tracks on Cinder, it just happens to benefit from a saxophonist and two singers playing over the top. And this is Lux Terminus’ problem in a nutshell: rather than composing compelling instrumental music in its own right, Cinder feels like it was composed for a vocalist or other players who never turned up to the recording studio. These are instrumental beds, foundations, the groundwork for something more impressive. But solos come sparingly, rhythms are repeated as though something else, some much-needed focal point, is meant to be happening atop them but was forgotten, meaning the tracks invariably seem rather lacking as a result. Cinder cries out for more guests, talented musicians with their own Lego bricks to creatively complete the constructions.

Almost everything about Cinder is far too reined in. When “P.L.O.N.K.” changes into a calmer gear, it feels completely unearned as the band haven’t done anything to deserve a break. “The Devil’s Eyes” offers some frenetic piano work, but one nevertheless gets the sense Shankar is holding back on us. When solos come along, it’s almost as though they’re merely filling an obligation, and the solo that closes out “Natsukashii” is so buried in the mix as to be disappointing for how ill-tended-for it is. Lux Terminus’ brief sojourns into djent (“Neon Rain”, “Mosaic Mind”, “The Devil’s Eyes”) are invariably their least inspired moments, doling out the most trudging and simplistic of rhythms with little going on over the top to distract the listener. The fact that “Natsukashii” is every bit as dull as the rest of the tracks but decides to be a bit crazy and mix things up with—checks notes—an indistinct shout in the outro, should tell you everything you need to know. Even the production on Kerschner’s drums is so restrained that it does a complete disservice to his talents. While the pads work well in the calmer sections, in heavier moments like those on “Apparent Horizon” he slowly becomes all but washed out. 

In a scene chock full of onanistic guitar performances that all sound the same, the guarantee of more compositionally focused performers, softer production, and an emphasis on piano and synths should be a slam dunk. And yet Lux Terminus do shockingly little with those tools, restraining their clear skill and creativity to the point of banality. Nothing about Cinder is unpleasant to listen to—it would take a genuine creative swing to do that—but it’s also never any better than merely nice. Indeed, it’s the sort of album for which nebulous adjectives like “nice” and “pretty” were devised. Like looking at a friend’s £734.99 Millennium Falcon Lego set, Lux Terminus sound flashy and incredibly well put together, but you’re left wondering, “where’s the imagination?” And then you see the box behind the set that reads: Basic Djent Instrumental, for ages 8+.

Recommended tracks: Catalyst, The Devil’s Eyes
You may also like: The Resonance Project, Etrange, Vipassi
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Lux Terminus is:
– Vikram A. Shankar (keyboards)
– Matthew Kerschner (drums)
– Brian Craft (bass guitars)

With:
– Paige Phillips, Mathilda Riley, Lynsey Ward (Espera) (backing vocals on “Jupiter”)
– Ross Jennings and Jon Pyres (vocals on “Catalyst”)
– Jørgen Munkeby (saxophone on “Catalyst”)

The post Review: Lux Terminus – Cinder appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: big band jazz, progressive metal, jazz fusion, djent (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Snarky Puppy, Meshuggah, Thank You Scientist, Animals as Leaders
Country: New Zealand
Release date: 24 March 2025

Prog is a kleptomaniac genre. It borrows from a range of influences from across the sonic firmament and prog fans will have heard a variety of weird and wonderful infusions into their rock and metal, from rap to klezmer to samba. But the two big genres that are most indelibly influential to progressive music are classical and jazz. Think Renaissance, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Wilderun; Imperial Triumphant, Thank You Scientist, Cynic. We usually know what to expect from bands that infuse classical and jazz influences into their style, but our expectations here at The Subway were rather blown away in 2023 by Haralabos Stafylakis’ Calibrating Friction. Stayflakis, a guitarist and classical composer, produced an album with a small orchestra plus drummer and guitars to create compositions grounded in the compositional trappings of classical music but utilising progressive metal tropes and textures; rather than making prog metal with a bit of orchestral influence, it was an orchestra with a bit of prog metal influence. Countless bands have tackled jazz fusion prog, but can anyone turn our jazz metal expectations on their head? 

Enter Chris Beernink, a bassist, guitarist, composer and audio engineer who has made the distinctly unprofitable decision to release a big band jazz metal album¹. In practice, this means guitars, bass and drums working on the rhythmic metal textures, with twelve sax and horn players providing the big band. The resulting concoction is less Ornette Coleman, more djent Snarky Puppy. Fans of the late Sound Struggle, as well as djent mainstays like Meshuggah or Animals as Leaders will find familiar metal flavours to enjoy, while fans of jazz instruments in prog will suffocate on an abundance of riches. 

Apocalyptic horns and gnarled metal rhythms make up the lion’s share of The Chimera Suite, so the moments playing against this tendency stand out. “II. Aergia” feels like something out of an Imperial Triumphant record, opening with eerie piano chords, restrained drumming, judicious guitar notes and some spooky horn work while slowly building inexorably towards a thundering, doomy heaviness. “I. Regenesis” takes a break for a noodling jazz guitar solo with quieter instrumentation behind. Though Beernink gives the requisite time for light and heavy to play out against one another, what’s lacking is respite from a generalised blunt force. “II. Aergia” is a softer track but it’s still somewhat dirging in its rhythms. The smoothness of that noodly guitar solo on “I. Regenesis” is the rarity, conveying a sense of delicacy much needed to balance out the heaviness. For most of its runtime, The Chimera Suite sounds like an angry swarm of bees in the best possible way, but it does threaten to wear the listener down.

The heavier metal ventures such as the doomy outro on “II. Aergia” are often the least interesting sonic elements, struggling to carve out their own identity when jettisoning the jazz. Beernink does like to throw in a thudding dirge riff every now and then—sometimes to better effect (e.g. as a rhythm for the horns and piano to work around as on “III. Event Horizon”) and sometimes just as heaviness for heaviness’s sake (“II. Aergia”). His bass and guitar playing is rooted firmly in the djent scene; anyone expecting the virtuosity of jazz fusion artists like Jaco Pastorius or Thundercat will be disappointed.

Opening track “I. Regenesis” feels almost like a jazz horn composition sitting on a metal rhythm section which was worked out after the fact, the two elements working complementarily whilst also threatening to tear one another apart. This contrapuntal polyrhythmic wonkery stays throughout, like a horny, over-saxed Meshuggah. “III. Event Horizon” opens with the madcap energy of the soundtrack from a chase scene in a 50s noir but, y’know, metal and chaotic, and it keeps that energy up for most of its nine-minute runtime, the horns reeling in their death throes at the song’s close.

In the middle of “V. Kleos”, the song goes quieter, allowing the horns to cavort and caper while Beernink’s bass chunters in the background. This builds to perhaps the most Snarky Puppy-esque section on The Chimera Suite as the horns rhapsodise in the space left by the main band exacting restraint. As the track reaches its finale, the saxes engage in a call and response refrain which becomes a rhythmic motif for the big band to bellow over before everything turns dissonant and Beernink starts hitting some low notes so heavy that one has to assume everyone in the studio had to change their underwear after recording.

However, as the track most connected to traditional jazz fusion, “IV. Fury Spawn” feels like the clear stand out of the record. The horns and woodwinds are less inclined to blast as hard as possible, the metal is less in-your-face—at least until the monstrous djent outro which suddenly explodes Car Bomb style. With the trumpet solo, the light piano work in the middle, and the far more deft drumwork, it could sit quite comfortably on a Snarky Puppy record up until that closing minute, and the lighter touch throughout the rest of the track works in favour of the crushingly heavy outro. Maybe I just prefer my jazz fusion lighter.  

Beernink can join Stafylakis as a composer pushing metal into brave new realms, his fusion of jazz and metal being rather unique for a blend that’s already been attempted a thousand times before. The Chimera Suite’s big band dreams are mostly fulfilling, and though it can fall a little into djenting chasms, these tend to be exceptions on a record that proves thrilling throughout. So come on down to the modern metal jazz club: smoking’s banned, there are no tables, and they serve pints in a plastic cup. It’s better than it sounds, I promise.

Recommended tracks: I. Regenesis, IV. Fury Spawn, V. Kleos
You may also like: Haralabos Stafylakis, Sound Struggle, Seven Impale, The Resonance Project, Sarmat
Final verdict: 7.5/10

1.  The Chimera Suite was created with funding from Creative New Zealand. A world in which douche-weasels like Elon Musk can gut government funding initiatives is one where we get fewer creative swings like this. ︎

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Label: Independent

Chris Beernink is:
– Shaun Anderson (drums)
– Chris Beernink (bass, guitars)
– Dan Hayles (piano, organ, synth)

– Jake Baxendale, Tyaan Singh (alto saxophones)
– Louisa Williamson, Blair Latham (tenor saxophones)
– Frank Talbot (baritone saxophone, contrabass saxophone)
– Jack Harré, Ben Hunt, James Guildford-Smith (trumpets)
– Kaito Walley, Matt Allison, Julian Kirgan-Baez, Patrick Di Somma (trombones)

The post Review: Chris Beernink – The Chimera Suite appeared first on The Progressive Subway.

Style: Progressive metal, mathcore, djent (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Tesseract, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Contortionist, Rolo Tomassi, Protest the Hero, The Mars Volta, Ions
Country: Italy
Release date: 11 March, 2025

Contrary to the wisdom of everyone’s favourite mad shredder, Yngwie Malmsteen, more isn’t more; less is more. Take the 1993 classic film, Jurassic Park, a landmark in special effects and everyone’s favourite dinosaur-laden romp. You’re probably picturing the T-Rex breaking out of the paddock, the majestic reveal of the brachiosaurus, or any number of iconic raptor scenes. You might be surprised, then, to hear that over the course of the film’s 127-minute runtime¹, dinosaurs grace the screen for a mere 15 minutes—or roughly 12% of the film. Everything you remember about that iconic piece of cinema you remember for its brevity, and the same is true of music; sometimes your sound can be defined by the thing you do sparingly.

Such an approach was certainly the aim on the debut of Italian prog metallers Benthos, but the confusingly-titled II struggled to break free of the shadow of their main influence, The Contortionist. Reinvigorated some four years on, their sophomore emphasises the nascent elements in their debut and brings them to the fore: mathy moments redolent of The Dillinger Escape Plan or Rolo Tomassi vie with djenting grooves and softer atmospheres, occasionally even segueing into The Mars Volta-esque trippy interludes. Some tracks flow rather gracefully (“From Nothing”), others are stitched together monstrosities (“Perpetual Drone Monkeys”), abrasive metal rubbing up against strange ambiences, alternately exploding and collapsing. 

Fittingly, “Fossil” may best demonstrate that Jurassic Park style less-is-more approach: abrasive, discordant math metal passages perforate the song’s facade at many junctures, but, despite being the defining feature of the music, they’re not the most common element. Across From Nothing, Gabriele Landillo’s soft, Dan Tompkins-esque cleans are utilised far more often than his harshes, and the composition remains legibly melodic for the most part, veering into total pandemonium for emphasis, rather than as a crutch. Comparisons to the likes of The Dillinger Escape Plan, then, should be taken with a pinch of salt. There are moments that sing from the hymn sheet of mathcore’s greatest group, but for the most part, Benthos stick to a more mellow register, recalling groups like Ions and The Safety Fire. 

Take “Let Me Plunge”, for example. At around the two minute mark, a heretofore measured riff suddenly mutates into discordant chaos. It takes all of about six seconds, but that sudden abrasiveness keeps the listener on their toes. Like getting a glimpse of a raptor’s claw in the opening of Spielberg’s iconic blockbuster², Benthos’ interjections of cacophony may not last long, but they’re a warning to the listener. And the listener is rewarded with their 12%: “As a Cordyceps” erupts repeatedly into hardcore-inspired vocals and blunt dissonant chords, “Fossil” opens in truly madcap Dillinger fashion and explodes into a chaotic crescendo before some much-needed respite, and “Perpetual Drone Monkeys” might be the most relentless track on the album; energetic and jarring as it whiplashes from djent to hardcore to math and back again with abandon. Nevertheless, this trio of tracks contains the vast bulk of the heavier and chaotic work on From Nothing.

Much of the rest of the time, From Nothing is defined by a jangling chorus effect on the chords and slightly off-kilter vocal harmonies, sitting somewhere between The Contortionist and Ions. “The Giant Child” is straightforward structurally and is arguably the record’s softest track, the band almost relaxed, Alessandro Tagliani’s intricate percussion notwithstanding. “Pure” follows with a mathier Tesseract vibe, but nevertheless eschewing heaviness until an explosive finale. The only exception to the light/heavy contrast running through the album is “Athletic Worms” which is simply insane. Robotic vocals play over zany instrumentation that sounds more like Igorrr. It’s an oddity on an otherwise more serious record, and likely to be the one that polarises listeners, but it nevertheless showcases the band’s creativity. And if that ain’t chaos theory then what is?

The most unexpected influence on Benthos is The Mars Volta. There’s a chaotic jazzy psychedelia undergirding many of From Nothing’s sonic decisions. When “Fossil” isn’t doing Dillinger-style mathcore, it’s exploring rapid jazz chord play and watery chorus effects. There’s also frenetic jazzy riffing juxtaposed with psychedelic, almost shoegaze moments in “To Everything”. Meanwhile, Landillo’s highest notes even have a touch of Bixler-Zavala to them, most notably in the opening to “Perpetual Drone Monkeys” which sounds like it just escaped from the comatorium. This facet of Benthos’ sound is what truly sets them apart from their contemporaries, injecting something slightly deranged into a more familiar facade. 

Less is more, Jurassic Park is a masterpiece, and From Nothing is a consistently intense, tightly composed paragon of modern progressive metal. With the agility of a pack of raptors, Benthos have cemented their own style and then some on a distinguished sophomore guaranteed to pull them into the scene’s limelight. They might not render their peers and predecessors extinct, but they’re certainly clever boys.

Recommended tracks: Let Me Plunge, As A Cordyceps, Perpetual Drone Monkeys, To Everything
You may also like: Without Waves, Exotic Animal Petting Zoo, The Hirsch Effekt
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: InsideOut Music – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Benthos is:
– Gabriele Landillo (vocals)
– Gabriele Papagni (guitars)
– Enrico Tripodi (guitars)
– Alberto Fiorani (bass)
– Alessandro Tagliani (drums)

1.  This includes credits. Assuming that without credits the runtime is closer to 120 minutes, the percentage creeps up to 12.5%. ︎
2.  “Shoooot heeeeerrrr!” ︎

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