Written by Welcome to Prog‘s brand new Tracks Of The Week! We’ve got six new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.
Congratulations to Tarja, who romped home for her second big TOTW win in a month with I Don’t Care. Coming a respectable second were young Mancunian prog rockers VMBRA, and we had our very first ever TOTW tie, with both A.A. Williams and Kristoffer Gildenlöw on the same amount of votes in joint third place
The premise is simple – we’ve collated a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you – makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn’t it? The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it’s a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post.
Couldn’t be easier, could it? We’ll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week we’ll update you with this week’s winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.
If you’re a band and you want to be featured in Prog‘s Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo and biog to us here.
MUSE – CRYOGEN
Never ones to shy away from a hefty dose of sci-fi fuelled prog with a tantaslising dash of conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure, Muse’s upcoming tenth studio album, The Wow! Signal, which the band release through Warner/Helium 3 on June 26, is named after the tale of a short radio burst detected in 1977 and which was discovered to have originated from the constellation Sagittarius, suggesting a possible extraterrestrial source. The astronomer who discovered the broadcast, Jerry R. Ehman, famously circled the now-iconic sequence “6EQUJ5” and scribbled “WOW!” on the printout beside it, giving the signal its now legendary name.
New single, Cryogen, boasts the kind of spiralling riff that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on earlier Muse classics like Plug In Baby and Knights Of Cydonia!
IRON JINN – THE FUTURIST
Dutch progressive rock quintet Iron Jinn are new to us here at Prog, but anyone whose first piece of music sent in is the near 18-minute long The Futurist, you sit up and take notice! The band have pedigree too, made upof members of the much-missed The Devil’s Blood, Molassess, Birth of Joy and Shaking Godspeed.
Musically, the band blends a psychedelic version of Steve Reich and 70’s jazzer McCoy Tyner, as The Futurist weaves its way through different musical passages. The band will release their as-yet-untitled second album in September of this year. Remember where you heard about them first!
IF THESE TREES COULD TALK – BLURRY CREATURES
Ohio-based post-rockers If These Trees Could Talk will release their first new studio album for a decade when they share their latest album, The Hidden Hand, through Metal Blade Records on July 10. The intensely catchy Blurry Creatures is the band’s brand new single.
“As we all get older and our musical tastes evolve, it‘s more of a challenge to keep the sound of the band in a specific lane and not venture too far away from where we originally started,” says drummer and band co-founder Zack Kelly. “It‘s almost the same way an orchestra would be set up with the bass guitar covering cello, the rhythm guitars holding down the woodwind section and the lead guitarist covering the strings section. No matter who comes up with a riff or where it starts, the end product must always have these three components present, especially when transitioning from clean to heavy tones.”
RAPHAEL WEINROTH-BROWNE – REFLECTION
Canadian cellist and composer Raphael Weinroth-Browne will return with his third studio album, Empyrean, on September 11, and here shares his first new music from said record. Reflection represents a rockier side to the musician, who will be supporting both Earthside and Einar Solberg on live dates later this year.
“Crushing and relentless, this piece is a reflection of my prog metal influences,” says Weinroth-Browne. “As a cellist, I’m unusual in that bands like Tool and Meshuggah are a more significant part of my musical DNA than composers such as Beethoven or Brahms.
“Reflection is one of the heaviest tracks I’ve released as a solo artist. I wanted it to feel imposing and immutable, like a monolith. Despite the snarling intensity of the insistent chugging riffs and pervading feeling of menace throughout, there is also something very meditative about its repetitiveness, as though it is guiding the listener to an altered state of consciousness amidst the turmoil and chaos.”
HANRY – HER CROWN, HER EMPIRE
French melodic and atmospheric post-rock quintet Hanry have shared a new live video for Her Crown, Her Empire, (filmed at Grabuge in Rennes), the third single taken from their forthcoming debut album What Came From Silence, set for release on May 29 via Pelagic Records
“Since the beginning of Hanry, cinematic imagery has been at the core of our artistic vision,” the band say. “We often compose from mental images, landscapes or scenes that could almost belong to a film. We wanted the album to feel like a continuous experience, something listeners can fully immerse themselves in and interpret in their own way.”
AISLES – LOBSTERS AND ANTS
Chilean prog quintet Aisles may have had a bit of a revolving line-up over recent years, but the current band seem to be settling nicely, if their recent run of singles, Blue Skies and Now Is the Time, are anything to go by. Their latest, the powerful Lobsters And Ants, which builds to represent a harder edge to the band.
“The song reflects on a world driven by madness and chaos. We gave ourselves the freedom to explore the absurd, diving into that space in search of meaning,” the band say. “The main riff originated from an idea Daniel (Concha, bass) created during our first composition camp, which became the foundation of the track. The lyrics are surreal and open-ended; they may or may not make sense, leaving space for free interpretation.”
