Table of contents for Issue 159 in Prog

AVKRVST have announced their return with the release of their second album, Waving At The Sky, which is out via InsideOutMusic on June 13. The new record is a thematic prequel to their debut album, The Approbation, and is inspired by what the band chillingly describe as “a gruesome family tragedy.” According to singer Simon Bergseth, Waving At The Sky was written between playing live shows in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway and sees the five-piece moving into a deeper prog territory. “With Waving At The Sky, we’ve tried to evolve ourselves in a bit more of an original direction,” he says. “It definitely sounds like us, but even more so than before. We aimed to dig a bit deeper into our musical selves, to try a bit more…

Quirky south-coast quartet The Hare And Hoofe are heading in new musical directions with their second album, Compasse, which is released on May 2 via Kent Music Corporation. It sees the band following the‘heavy mellow’ route, also used by fellow psych-prog artist Jane Weaver, as they navigate their way through the increasingly strange world of today where nothing is quite what it seems. They cryptically allude to the album’s contents saying, “Compasse rediscovers the missing direction between Hare and Hoofe. It charts the spaces between digital and pastoral, concrete and sylvan, heavy and mellow, finding a new genre: heavy mellow. And that way lies enlightenment; a balm for our troubled age.” Spread across nine tracks, Compasse will be available on CD and digital formats. No live dates had been confirmed…

Steve Hackett and Genesis Revisited vocalist Nad Sylvan releases Monumentata, his fifth solo album for InsideOutMusic, on June 20. For all his trademark flamboyance, the Swede feels that on this record he’s “showing fans who I really am.” Having previously adopted the ‘Vampirate’ persona, he’s followed 2021’s poetically-inspired Spiritus Mundi by tapping into his own personal backstory. Songs such as Monte Carlo Priceless and the title track are prominent examples: the former tells of a young woman travelling the world to follow her dreams (inspired by his mother’s experiences); the latter sees the singer delve into his own complicated relationship with his parents. “This whole album is basically a tribute to my father, who passed away last year at 96,” he says. It’s his most personal record yet and finds…

The image of a pair of teenage pals bonding over music and aspiring to form a band to take on the world has never lost any of its romantic potency, but few are the bands that have travelled halfway across the world to fulfil their dreams. Not so prog metallers Derev, whose guitarist Armando Bablanian and drummer Michel Karakach rose to the challenge after initially meeting in high school in Kuwait before finally forming the band in Canada after a period of separation. “I came to Canada to study and Michel moved to Syria to continue his studies,” recall Bablanian. “We were always up-to-date with what we were doing with our lives and with our music. We never really knew if it was ever going to work out until Michel came…

The prog top 30 albums March 2025 Compiled by 1 SLEEP TOKEN Take Me Back To Eden (SPINEFARM) 2 JETHRO TULL Curious Ruminant (INSIDEOUTMUSIC) 3 KRAFTWERK Autobahn (50th Anniversary Edition) (PARLOPHONE) 4 SLEEP TOKEN This Place Will Become Your Tomb (SPINEFARM) 5 DREAM THEATER Parasomnia (INSIDEOUTMUSIC) 6 MOGWAI The Bad Fire (ROCK ACTION) 7 DAVID GILMOUR Luck And Strange (SONY MUSIC) 8 JEAN-MICHEL JARRE Zoolook (SONY) 9 YES Close To The Edge (RHINO) 10 PINK FLOYD Animals (PINK FLOYD RECORDS/RHINO) 11 MATT BERRY Heard Noises (ACID JAZZ) 12 MOSTLY AUTUMN Seawater (MOSTLY AUTUMN RECORDS) 13 OPETH The Last Will And Testament (REIGNING PHOENIX MUSIC) 14 PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING The Last Flight (SO RECORDINGS) 15 WARDRUNA Birna (BY NORSE/SONY) 16 NIGHTWISH Yesterwynde (NUCLEAR BLAST) 17 PETER GABRIEL i/o (REAL WORLD RECORDS) 18…

With five solo albums in just over a decade, Airbag’s chief songwriter Bjørn Riis has proved more than capable of flying the nest. He’s been getting his talons into the “heavier stuff I wasn’t allowed to” in his main gig, but that doesn’t mean those solo records are full of clangour and anger. If anything, it’s quite the opposite, and on his fifth LP, Fimbulvinter, he’s exposing more of his soul than ever before. On it, he weaves through a turbulent time in his life by looking to the artists that made him fall in love with music, via tender turns and grit in equal measure. The entire record hinges on the concept of mental fragility, charting the pain and anxiety that precedes a breakdown, just as how, in Norse…

It wasn’t just WOTEOT’s music that made a big impact – it was also its striking sleeve. Thanks to the design genius of Barney Bubbles, Hawkwind had become renowned for the extravagant packaging of their albums, the fold-out sleeves of In Search Of Space and Space Ritual in particular. WOTEOT came in another innovative gatefold cover, with a die-cut drop-down section revealed when it was opened. On the front was a knight on horseback at the lip of a plunging precipice, rendered in vividly psychedelic colours; on the reverse, it was an impressive shield of chaos.Yet, the identity of who actually illustrated the WOTEOT sleeve has been a mystery ever since its release. In the album’s credits,” concept and art direction” is attributed to Comte Pierre D’Auvergne and Eddie Brash,…

Since the release of Dim Gray’s last album, Firmament, Oskar Holldorff has accepted a permanent role as pianist/keyboard player in Big Big Train. And he’s thrilled about it. “It all ties in with Prog because one of your writers, Nick Shilton, sent us an email. One thing led to another and he became our manager – Nick manages Big Big Train as well,” Holldorff recounts. “When Carly Bryant couldn’t make a tour they asked me to fill in. My first thought was that it would be too difficult, but I’d give it a try anyway. Later on, they offered me the job full-time. It’s been very, very cool.” As a studio performer, Holldorff debuted with BBT on last year’s The Likes Of Us. It was the group’s first full-length album…

“Mostly Autumn is life, loss and nature, generally speaking,” says founding father Bryan Josh. “We’re moved by nature, the sadness of loss, and the light and glory of life, making the most of it. Those are the messages that have always come through and I guess we just do it in different ways on each album.” From For All We Shared… in 1998 through to the freshly hatched Seawater, those themes permeate and define the distinctive style of Mostly Autumn. Seawater is the follow-up to 2021’s Graveyard Star, an album that found Josh in a distinctly sombre mood, bearing the mental toll of lockdown. “An album is a song in itself. You have to feel where the energy and emotion lead you from song to song. It should flow and…

Heartbeat ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT RECORDS Moody vibes from the evocative electronic-classical duo. Aisling Brouwer and Anna Phoebe return with their third album as AVAWAVES (their fifth release, including their soundtrack recordings for The Buccaneers and Savage Waters). Heartbeat finds the duo in a distinctly sombre mood. In a fashion reminiscent of Björk’s third album Homogenic, minus the Icelandic singer’s distinctive voice, the music is built around the sound of Phoebe’s violin and Brouwer’s piano as they glide and flow over a bedrock of electronic beats. It’s those grooves that give the album its defining, titular Heartbeat, pulsing steadily and reassuringly beneath the melodies. “A mood piece rich with the flavour of melancholy.” It’s an oft-overused phrase, but this is a cinematic listen, an album that evokes atmospheres, movement and images…

There Is No Space For Us CHERRY RED The space rockers’ late-career purple patch continues in fine style. When Hawkwind recorded Stories From Time And Space last spring, the songwriting process yielded nearly 40 minutes of leftover material that just needed arranging, making this a sister album of sorts. Since 2019’s All Aboard The Skylark, the group have sounded rejuvenated and There Is No Space For Us is another instalment rich in immersive sonic detail, and with considerable power and momentum allied to a vivid, panoramic sound. “Considerable power and momentum allied to a vivid production.” The opener There Is Still Danger begins with Tim ‘Thighpaulsandra’ Lewis and Magnus Martin’s dancing sequencers and upward arcing synths. Dave Brock enters like an old testament prophet delivering judgement on our collective folly:…

Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe) COOKING VINYL Landmark prog debut retains its enigma. Eric Woolfson had been working on a concept album about Poe’s writings when he envisaged a way to combine his talents with those of the producer and Beatles/Floyd engineer he managed – Alan Parsons. A shape-shifting studio ensemble, the Project believed in the power of that studio over individual starry charisma. They didn’t require a satin-clad, hip-wiggling demi-god up front. Accidental mystique ensued. Players came and went, but concepts remained high. This 1976 debut wasn’t as fully realised as subsequent releases but it’s a significant (and million-selling) milestone in prog’s evolution, developing drama as it gets less bitty and more bombastic. Its dreams within dreams draw one in as it drives into deeper, darker…

At Pompeii – MCMLXXII SONY Stunning restoration shines new light on classic footage. Some readers of a certain age will recall seeing Pink Floyd At Pompeii as part of a series of all-nighter screenings featuring various rock docs in the mid-70s – they were events frequently accompanied by a large alcohol intake beforehand. Inevitably, as the movies in the dark and warmth of the cinema ticked by, and the booze and the wee hours took their toll, falling asleep was often the outcome. “It now boasts crisp audio complementing the improved visuals.” Happily there’s no danger of nodding off in front of this extended edition of Floyd’s historic performance exhumed from the band’s archives. Featuring an 85-minute feature film version and the 60-minute edit, lovingly restored frame by frame sourced…

VENUE THE LOWER THIRD, LONDON DATE 09/03/2025 SUPPORT SOMETHING OR OTHER, SWEETPOOL Line-ups from London Prog Gigs are certainly putting the progress into progressive rock at the moment. Tonight’s bill, at plush Denmark Street basement venue The Lower Third, provides a kaleidoscopic and positively synapse-snapping array of talented outfits. Kyros, top of the bill and somehow bringing Christmas and Halloween to the stage all at the same time (a kind of Noel’s House Party meets Beetlejuice energy), are one of those rare groups that accrue fans not only through their excellent records, but through a word-of-mouth enthusiasm and incredulity at the overloading of senses their live performances engender. More enthusing about them in a short while. First up, from Birmingham comes Sweetpool, an unreconstructed trio of motorik free spirits who’ve…

VENUE ALBERT HALL, MANCHESTER DATE 14/03/2025 SUPPORT NIGHT VERSES Like the chiming of midnight on New Year’s Eve, anniversary tours provide ample opportunity for reflection. It’s been 11 years since Animals As Leader’s boundarypushing Joy Of Motion LP came out – their 10-year jubilee kicked off in the States last year – and the band’s stock, fuelled by Tosin Abasi’s generational talents, has bulged considerably since. As they effortlessly churn out their gargantuan tunes in this former Wesleyan chapel and now superlative music hall, it’s clear no one has come close to matching them, either. The crowd is a singular knotted entity throughout, lapping up enough time signatures to make Phil Collins lose his mind. Californian instrumentalists Night Verses are fresh off touring with Tool, and it’s easy to see…

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Revered Swedish prog metal gloom mongers Katatonia sent shockwaves through their fanbase in March when it was announced that founding guitarist Anders Nyström had left the band after 34 years and 12 albums. Co-founding vocalist Jonas Renkse, however, isn’t resting on his laurels. He will usher in a new era of the band when they release their 13th LP Nightmares As Extensions Of The Waking State on June 6. The album, dropping via Napalm Records, features a new-look line-up with two new guitar players. Renkse is eyeing new heights. “When I listen to the album, I hear a band that’s still very hungry and wants to do new things and go to new places,” he says. “There’s a drive, a new energy, and new ideas.” Renkse had said Nyström’s departure…

Building on the success of last year’s event, which returned after a six-year hiatus, the organisers of Spain’s Be Prog! My Friend festival have revealed an expanded line-up for the 2025 edition. Taking place for the second time at its new home of La Carpa at Barcelona’s open-air architectural museum, Poble Espanyol, on September 26-27, the 1,200-capacity event will be headlined by UK proggers The Pineapple Thief and prog metal quintet TesseracT. “It was an easy choice to make,” says festival chief Juan Antonio Muñoz of his headliners. “TesseracT played at the very first edition of the festival in 2014. Since then, they’ve released great albums and have become much bigger. It’s natural that they should headline here, as well as The Pineapple Thief, who are bigger than ever in…

“I feel almost like an angry dog or something when I’m playing sometimes,” admits Lars Fredrik Frøislie, the sometimes reserved keyboard player of Norwegian proggers Wobbler. His second solo album, Gamle Master, is released via Karisma on May 9 and he’s describing the act of spontaneous recording. The musician is talking to Prog from his studio, constantly set up with analogue instruments, so he can record in a moment if he feels so inclined. “Sometimes I record without thinking. If I find a nice bit, I’ll lay drums and bass on top of it,” he reveals. His latest album features an atmospheric blend of analogue keyboards in a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks. All keyboards, vocals and drums are by Frøislie, with guests Nikolai Hængsle on bass and Ketil…

EVERY YEAR KEXP, the radio station and YouTube channel based out of the University Of Washington in the US, crosses the Atlantic to visit the Trans Musicales festival in Rennes, Brittany, on the hunt for new talent to showcase. At the December 2023 event, KEXP filmed a live session with instrumental post-rock sextet Hanry, who performed three tracks from their debut EP Panorama. That video landed them a deal with Germany’s Pelagic Records, with whom they’ve just released their second EP, Disruption. For Panorama, founding guitarist Anthony Leliard created full demos, but the writing for Disruption became more collaborative. “We went in the studio, playing instruments, making loops – we wanted to find new ideas in the studio live,” says guitarist Jean-Anaël Aubaux. “It’s more about improvisation, jamming; we find…

EVEN IF YOUR tolerance to metal means you’d rather spend seasons in the abyss than listen to Slayer, the sultry, experimental dark-pop undertow of Venamoris might just pull you in. The duo consists of vocalist and songwriter Paula Lombardo and multi-instrumentalist husband Dave who, despite his protestations, is undoubtedly still best known as the original and definitive drummer with the thrash legends. “I don’t think I’m typecast,” he says with a shrug. “I can go from extreme music to the most ambient or atonal style of music and enjoy and embrace it for what it is. Anybody that’s known my career and followed me knows that about me.” He does have a point. The man has played with avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn and alongside Mike Patton in experimental rock outfits…

“It’s getting to be like a war, isn’t it?” – Dave Brock, December 1974. At the beginning of 1975, Hawkwind were at the peak of their commercial success. The band were in the middle of their annual UK winter tour – extended over three months – and were playing to thousands of adoring fans each night in sold-out city halls up and down the country. They’d also started to break North America, having toured there twice the previous year, with their last album Hall Of The Mountain Grill making a decent showing on the Billboard chart. They were a band in demand, and apparently destined for even greater things. But they were also physically and mentally exhausted, and fast approaching burnout. As the quote above (taken from a Melody Maker…

As the progenitors of the form lovingly known as space rock, it can become a little too easy to second-guess Hawkwind, a band who, like post-punk pioneers The Fall, occupy that rare space where the prefix of ‘The Mighty’ is regularly and justifiably applied. After all, with the vapour trail that’s been left in their sonic wake since they blasted off from the countercultural mission control of Ladbroke Grove in the 60s through the free festival circuit of the 70s and beyond, Hawkwind haven’t exactly applied subtlety to their aesthetic in the shape of album titles that include In Search Of Space, Space Ritual and Space Bandits. More recently, a string of albums with an increasing focus on dystopian themes that began with 2016’s The Machine Stops through to last…

“The reconnection with Andy and Ian has been one of the nicest things to come out of this. Andy, especially, has been highly engaged – this would not have happened without him. And the timing feels right.” Greg Spawton On Big Big Train’s tour last year, one of the main musical highlights was the deepest cut on the setlist. Long, proggy and drawing on founder member Gregory Spawton’s passion for history, The Last English King preceded the work of the band’s current iteration, dating back even before the tenure of their much-missed frontman, David Longdon. The song was from their third album, Bard, in 2002, when the acclaim and prestige BBT now enjoy seemed light years away. They had already been going for 12 years by then, and – with…

“We never consciously take time off,” says IQ vocalist Peter Nicholls, when the subject of the near-six-year gap between albums is tentatively raised. He has a point. The band play at annual weekenders and have frequently appeared onstage over the last few years, but to many, it still feels like they’ve been missing in action. Objectively though, their last two albums have contained a substantial amount of fresh material, and as Nicholls confesses, they merely needed a break from the studio. “We don’t set a timetable of recording one album every five years. I guess each album takes a couple of years to get through and, with the last two, Road Of Bones and Resistance, they were either a double or there was a bonus disc. So essentially, that’s twice…

At one point during Prog’s chat with Antimatter’s Mick Moss, he plucks an old four-track Tascam cassette recorder from a shelf above him. It only has volume and pan controls – “no bass, treble or EQ, and there’s no scope for putting effects in,” he explains – and in this day and age it looks better suited to a museum of recording artefacts than a studio. But it’s not just an old piece of junk collecting dust. It’s the four-track on which Moss recorded his formative material as a fledging musician in the 1990s, and perhaps acts as a symbol of his journey through the ranks over the last 25 years. Moss has delved back into those recordings for his project’s latest release, Parallel Matter, with the early four-track tunes…

It’s not unusual to find Chris Judge Smith amid a pile of books. This is, after all, a man who’s made the written word his living. “I like telling stories,” he says over video-call from his home study. “That’s why quite a few of my music projects have been long-form story-based. Or ‘songstories’, as I call them.” At 76, Smith remains one of Britain’s cult treasures. He’s familiar to Peter Hammill fans through his pivotal role in co-founding Van der Graaf Generator in 1967, when the two teenagers were studying at the University of Manchester. And while Smith admits his musical abilities are limited – both as a singer and drummer – he helped VdGG recruit members, secure them a record deal and appeared on their 1969 debut single, People…

Deep Water INSIDEOUTMUSIC Former Spock’s Beard man reasserts his beliefs via new supergroup. God knows Neal Morse loves a project. Driven and prolific, late last year he released No Hill For A Climber, an LP with some younger, lesser-known talents under the moniker The Resonance, and now comes Deep Water, the debut album by Cosmic Cathedral, a supergroup of sorts again instigated and masterminded by Morse. Featuring himself on vocals, guitar and keyboards; Chester Thompson (Genesis, Weather Report) on drums; veteran guitar magus Phil Keaggy (who also shares lead vocals) and Byron House (Robert Plant, Al Green) on bass, the group have some serious musical credentials. Another thread that binds, though, is the quartet’s shared Christian faith. Deep Water takes its name from a phrase used in a sermon by…

Fimbulvinter KARISMA Airbag guitarist digs deep into himself for solo rumination. That Fimbulvinter, the fifth solo album from Airbag guitarist Bjørn Riis, is submerged in a mood of introspective melancholy is in full evidence before a note of music has been played. With the album cover shot in stark monochrome and devoid of any sense of joy, warmth or happiness, Riis rests his head in his right hand in an image that’s less concerned with contemplative thought and more a brooding meditation on external pressures that contribute to internal turmoil. “The apple doesn’t fall too far from Airbag’s tree.” Similarly, the album’s title draws from Norse mythology, a period of extreme winter that precedes Ragnarök, which in itself sees the end of the world before it rises, cleansed and starts…

The Albums: 1968-1972 SVART A lavish, generously annotated box set celebrating folk’s first supergroup. Pentangle released six albums between 1968-1972, but the wealth of bonus material here expands this fine collection to a mammoth 14 discs of vinyl. Out-takes, live tracks and material cherry-picked from contemporaneous solo albums by the group’s esteemed guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn all feature, and with 20,000 words of sleeve notes and six different music journalists each writing an essay specific to one of the half-dozen Pentangle albums revisited, it’s hard to imagine a more thorough or inviting introduction to the band’s key releases. “It’s hard to imagine a more thorough introduction.” Given the group’s later influence and heady confluence of talent, it’s extraordinary to think that Transatlantic – the imprint that released Pentangle’s…

FISH VENUE THE PALLADIUM, LONDON DATE 25/02/2025 SUPPORT ALISSIMON Here we are, at last. It’s time to say a fond farewell to Fish, one of rock’s most gifted lyricists and an artist whose catalogue has played a massive role in the lives of Prog readers for more than four decades. But all good things come to an end and following last year’s triumphant auf wiedersehen to the continental mainland, the UK leg of this much-vaunted farewell tour, ‘Road To The Isles’, is five dates old as it rolls into London town. The line-up of Fish’s band reconnects some emotional ties with the past, but in another touching link with days gone by it falls to Alissimon, an indie-folk singer-songwriter whose father happens to be original Marillion bassist Diz Minnitt, to…

VENUE SYMPHONY HALL, BIRMINGHAM DATE 18/3/2025 SUPPORT JO QUAIL No mere club could ever hope to contain Wardruna. Einar Selvik’s Nordic folk/prog/metal-adjacent project played their first gig in front of 9th-century Viking ships in 2009 and have built a tour itinerary that’s seen them pop up in venues both illustrious and unique in the years since. On this latest run, they’ll appear at London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall, but thankfully the regional dates are no less grandiose, with an appointment at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. It’s a perfectly appropriate setting – on the surface, at least – for Jo Quail, the solo cellist opening tonight’s ceremony. “The first time I saw this room, I cried,” she admits, typically warm and self-effacing as she sets up for the night with an electric…

Where’s home? I currently reside in Liverpool, but I was born and bred in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. What your earliest memory of prog music? My mum and dad have exceptional taste in music. Dad is a massive prog fan, and I remember sitting in the school locker rooms listening to Dream Theater on repeat through my headphones – they were my gateway to prog rock. From there, I found the 70s acts that I’m more influenced by nowadays. What’s the first prog album you bought? I think it was Dream Theater’s Images And Words. At the time, it was like holding the Holy Grail, but I’m less interested in them, and prog metal, these days. And the latest? A used copy of Caravan’s For Girls Who Grow Plump In The…

“We’ve never let loose as much as we have on this record,” says Norwegian jazz/prog rock guitarist Hedvig Mollestad. Bees In The Bonnet, out on May 9 via Rune Grammofon, marks the first new release from the always combustible Hedvig Mollestad Trio since Ding Dong. You’re Dead in 2021. Reunited in the studio with bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad, the trio sound heavier than ever on their seventh studio album. The bandleader attributes the music’s sonic power to the fact that she has been able to express what she calls the “experimental stuff that I have inside my head” in her other projects, such as the Maternity Beat collaboration with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, or 2023’s Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns, the organ trio album with keyboardist Ståle Storløkken…

“We’re a very settled unit,” says John Hackett, reflecting on his band’s 10-year prog odyssey. “What I love is that everyone’s a very strong writer and very creative.” Their new album, Red Institution, out via Hacktrax on April 11, is very much a collaborative effort. Speaking with the quartet of virtuoso flautist/instrumentalist Hackett, guitarist Nick Fletcher, bassist Jeremy Richardson and drummer Duncan Parsons, it’s hard not to sense the bond of friendship. “The way that the band has evolved and grown,” says Hackett, “and all the things we’ve done together, it just felt very natural for everyone to contribute to this so very much.” With all four bandmembers accomplished solo artists, it’s no surprise that Red Institution encompasses an eclectic and impressive range of moods. “A lot of the songs on…

After an extended solo absence, veteran keyboardist Peter Baumann returns on May 16 with Nightfall, issued via Bureau B. The belated follow-up to 2016’s Machines Of Desire sees the ex-Tangerine Dream maestro deepening his love of instrumental textures, creating rich soundscapes forever in flux. The idea began during sessions with Austrian musician Paul Haslinger (also formerly of Tangerine Dream) for 2019’s collaborative Neuland. “I really started developing those musical ideas about a year and a half ago,” Baumann explains. “I wanted to make an album that’s relatively quiet – so no fast rhythms, no aggressive melodies – but very moody. The way I approached this record was to let all the pieces grow organically. They all influence each other and they morph; it’s really like a garden that’s growing.” Many of…

“The first time I heard The Edgar Winter Group was when I was probably eight years old. I was at my older cousin’s house and Frankenstein was a new single – he had just bought the 45. He put it on his record player, and the next day I went out and bought it for myself. It was one of the first records that I ever bought and I’ve still got it. I loved it and around that time, The Edgar Winter Group were on [TV show] Midnight Special and that performance just blew my mind! Edgar has albinism and when the lights hit him, it was kind of trippy; he had that ARP synthesiser on a strap around his neck so he could walk around while he was playing.…

Often dubbed the Radiohead of metal, Deftones have always flirted with the more experimental side of things. Raised on a steady diet of art-rock, shoegaze, and hip-hop, they’ve exhibited, via shifting time signatures, unorthodox song structures and a fascination of the obscure, a derring-do far beyond their alt metal peers. Their sixth LP was crafted in strange times. A record with the tentative title of Eros was meant to succeed Saturday Night Wrist, written while Chino Moreno battled drug addiction and divorce. They’d even entered the studio with producer Terry Date (Dream Theater, Soundgarden) in 2008, but when bassist Chi Cheng fell into a coma following a car accident, the band shelved the record. Cheng passed in 2013, and Eros never saw the light of day. What the world got…

AT JUST 24 years old, Leoni Jane Kennedy already has some seriously impressive achievements under her belt. Music has always been in her life, and despite not having a particularly musical family, she discovered the guitar from an early age. “I was initially invested because I was just a kid and intrigued by the actual instrument, but that eventually led to me getting into heavy rock groups. My first concert was Status Quo,” she says. “When I got to about 11, my mum took me to pubs for jam nights, which were just groups of 60-year-old men playing old-school rock every Thursday night. I loved it.” At 18, Leoni moved to Guildford where she was awarded the Freddie Mercury Scholarship, endorsed by the remaining members of Queen. This allowed her…

CHATTING FROM HER home in Copenhagen via Zoom, singer-songwriter Clarissa Connelly often returns to the theme of artistic bravery. It’s a quality she admires in artists such as Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell – and one which informs her own most recent LP, last year’s World Of Work. On opener Into This, Called Loneliness, Connelly’s voice segues between almost choral purity and otherworldly growl, while on The Bell Tower/An Embroidery, her modulating piano chords arrive after a transporting found-sound passage in which she’s heard climbing an ancient church tower to ring its bell. “That was on the island of Bornholm, off the east coast of Denmark,” she says with a smile. “I found a church with an echoey stone stairway so you would hear my footsteps. Church bells fascinate me;…

As one of Ladbroke Grove’s most prominent denizens, Michael Moorcock had worked on and off with Hawkwind since 1971. The idea of ‘the eternal champion’, a warrior fated to maintain the balance between law and chaos, had its origins in his stories of Elric of Melniboné, a king born with albinism. However, as the editor of innovative but cash-strapped SF magazine New Worlds, many of Moorcock’s subsequent Eternal Champion novels, featuring heroes including Erekosë, Prince Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon (the partsource of Hawkwind’s name), were essentially written to fund its publication. In fact, the ‘final’ novel in the sequence, The Quest For Tanelorn, had just come out in February 1975.Moorcock and his band The Deep Fix had their debut (and only) album New Worlds Fair, which featured members of Hawkwind,…

When Prog spoke to Solstice founder Andy Glass in 2020 prior to the release of their sixth studio album Sia, he was bubbling with excitement about the band’s more youthful new line-up. Fast-forward five years and Glass fizzes with abundant delight: a few months ago, Solstice swept the board in the 2024 Prog Readers’ Poll in a manner befitting Marillion, Steven Wilson and Big Big Train in previous years. Being voted Best Band is the crowning glory, but Glass is equally stunned to clinch the hotly contested Best Guitarist accolade ahead of Steve Rothery, Steve Hackett and David Gilmour. Ebony Buckle, Solstice’s backing vocalist, who often opens their shows, completes their winning hat-trick with Best New Artist. “It’s so incredibly motivating and brilliant – and it means the world to…

“It’s been hard to find our tribe. It would be uninteresting to sound like someone else. Our whole reason for doing music is to find a form of expression that is unique.” Oskar Holldorff The shade of colour known as ‘dim gray’ is a muted and desaturated intermediary fusion of black and white. It’s versatile and understated, perfect for creating a subtle and sophisticated ambiance. Identical qualities are shared by the Norwegian group of the same name, a band that, over the course of two critically acclaimed albums (a 2020 debut, Flown, followed by Firmament two years later), fused individual backgrounds in cinematic sounds, blues, prog, art-rock, folk, classical, chamber pop and even black metal to weave an ethereal style all their own. Growing interest in Dim Gray, who recently…

“It’s progressive rock, so you can allow yourself to think in bigger structures. If you work on something where you know it should be three or four minutes in length, there’s things you don’t do. But Everon is like setting my antennae in a different direction.” Over the years, bands come and bands go. Some come to an end by imploding spectacularly. Others go out with more of a whimper than a bang. Some just slip quietly away. Everon seemingly fell into this last category, exiting the music scene following the release of North, their seventh studio album, in 2008. “The process of making North dragged out far too long for a number of reasons,” explains Oliver Philipps from his home near Krefeld, to the northwest of Düsseldorf. “When I…

You’d imagine Gary Kemp would be brimming with confidence given his impressive CV. As well as being guitarist and singer in Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, Kemp has sold more than 25 million records with Spandau Ballet, starred in blockbusters including The Krays and The Bodyguard, and hosts Rockonteurs, the UK’s number one music podcast, with his bandmate and best mate Guy Pratt. You would imagine he’d be confident, but you’d be wrong. “I’m not,” he protests, his forehead crumpling into a frown as he sits across a conference table from Prog in his publicist’s office. Sixty-five-year-old Kemp – whose new album This Destination was released at the end of January – is smartly attired in button-up black shirt and charcoal gilet, the very picture of health, but mention of…

prog.reviews@futurenet.com Since forming in 1981, IQ have established themselves as a veritable British prog institution. They’ve kept working consistently, their annual Christmas shows have become semi-legendary, and they retain a firm and ever-enthusiastic fanbase. They could not, however, be accused of being overly prolific, averaging one album every five years. Dominion follows 2019’s substantial double Resistance, offering a more accessible and digestible prospect with a shorter running time, although it’s definitely a case of quality over quantity. Epic opener The Unknown Door is presented as a four-part suite. Ushered in by a measured, stately synth fanfare, a clarion call in the near distance, and Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the declaration of war from 1939 low in the mix, the first four minutes of first part Faint Equations is a graceful,…

Love INSIDEOUTMUSIC Roine Stolt and his band of Yes-men share the love. These are halcyon days for fans of Yes music. As well as the Steve Howe-led ‘original’ version, technically inactive at this precise moment in time but still a going concern, there’s former singer Jon Anderson and his Band Geeks, singing as well as he ever has with a group of Yesalikes who are just as capable of carbon copying the old band as they are of capturing the spirit of 70s Yes with their new music. And if those two weren’t enough, there’s Roine Stolt’s The Flower Kings, who have been on a Yes-friendly creative roll since their 2018 relaunch, a handy surrogate for anyone craving the feel of the prog pioneers’ glory days without directly replicating them.…

Seawater MOSTLY AUTUMN RECORDS Bryan Josh and co steer a course through turbulent waters. Mostly Autumn’s last album, 2021’s Graveyard Star, found guitarist, co-vocalist and chief songwriter Bryan Josh in a distinctly downbeat mood, dealing with the toll of lockdown. Seawater casts off its predecessor’s heavy pall although, true to form, the album finds Josh exploring his signature themes of melancholy and memory. There’s always been a Celtic tang to Mostly Autumn, and the presence of Nightwish’s Troy Donockley on pipes and flutes brings out that influence in the album’s deceptively upbeat opening track Let’s Take A Walk. At times the album moves towards a country rock vibe somewhere in the realms of Big Country and Bon Jovi, which feels like a new side to Josh’s writing. Tunes like Be…

Phaedra – 50th Anniversary Edition UNIVERSAL MUSIC RECORDINGS Six-disc box set shines new light on the creation of an electronic landmark. Even at a remove of 50 years, it remains remarkable that a largely melody-free soundscape created by then un-conventional instrumentation not only ram-raided the UK’s album charts, but became so influential that its ramifications are still being felt to this very day. Not least as Tangerine Dream had evolved from Berlin’s radical Zodiac Free Arts Lab, a venue that effectively charted the growth of Germany’s post-war underground’s gradual estrangement from the influence of American and British blues and rock and into something wholly contemporary and original. “It confirms the album’s brilliance and illuminates its creation.” With no concessions to what had come before, the trio of Edgar Froese, Christopher…