The path that led to Snarky Puppy becoming one of the most celebrated modern ensembles began with a small circle of musicians at the University of North Texas who were hungry to explore something new. The group was formed in Denton in 2004 under the leadership of bassist and composer Michael League, who pulled together fellow students for a project that would combine funk, jazz, rock, and world music with a level of musicianship that demanded respect from the beginning. Snarky Puppy started out recording and performing wherever they could, building their foundation through constant rehearsal, relentless playing, and a
Radar Festival have announced what is set to be one of the moments of next Summer, bringing in a legend within both musical and gaming spheres.
Oh yes. Mick Gordon, the man behind crafting the sound design on games such as DOOM, DOOM Eternal and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, and working with bands such as Bring Me The Horizon and Motionless In White, is going to be making a world-exclusive live appearance.
Well, actually, it is a world first.
The festival had this to say about the announcement:
“The composer behind the legendary DOOM soundtrack is bringing it to the stage for the very first time.
The actual composer. The actual score. The DOOM Machine. A full live band. An orchestra.
This isn’t a DJ set. It isn’t a tribute. It’s the music that redefined video game soundtracks, performed live, properly loud, exactly as it deserves. Mick has never performed this music live like this.
Until now.”
Radar will be taking place in 2027 across the weekend of July 30 – August 01. Tickets will be on sale from next Friday (August 07).
Two is company. Three is a crowd. But what is a band? In recent years it has become difficult to say. Once upon a time you needed a band to write, to record, to be a band. Now, modern technologies and online spaces allow you to exist as a creative entity without that burden. It’s a trend, possibly accelerated by lockdown, but one thing is for sure, it has led to some stunning music.
Future Palace are a trio, two men and a female singer. It’s a setup similar to bands like Yonaka or Exploring Birdsong, except their music leans more towards metalcore. You might even call it post-metalcore; a mix of weighty riffs and big choruses, like a heavier take on hard-rock.
Manuel Kohlert, the trio’s guitarist, is largely responsible for the music. He favours big, groove-based riffs with occasional synths to add an extra dimension to songs like ‘Deep Blue’ and ‘Tidal Wave’. It’s a strong sound but relatively indistinct. There are plenty of reasons for this; the guitar tones, the synth styles, the sound mix. Basically, if you’ve explored this type of music before, it’ll feel familiar. Importantly though, it all sounds good.
This is the band’s fourth record. Interestingly their 2024 album ‘Distortion’ featured guest vocals from Charlie Rolfe of As Everything Unfolds. The two bands make similar music. It is easy to compare the two, particularly on songs like ‘Ebb And Flow’ and ‘Nixy’ which have a stronger keyboard element and push them into the same vein. The difference between their two sounds is intention. This is less distinct but goes so much harder.
The introduction, ‘Deep Blue’, almost feels like a tease towards the second track, ‘Resurge’, which establishes the record’s overall tone. It has a strong backbone and scratching record sounds that give it an early Papa Roach vibe, but it’s the rhythm that makes it so powerful. Everything, including the screamed vocals, marches at the same pace, making it sound absolutely massive. Once the ball is rolling, the record gains momentum, becoming a series of impressive peaks. Despite the record not feeling particularly distinctive overall, each song is great in its own right and, because the quality is so consistently high, it’s an easy album to listen to. It’s also easy to recommend.
As if to counteract the album’s overly familiar sound, each of the individual songs has its own flavour. A good example is the leading single ‘Supernova’, which deploys a wicked electronic pulsing that might remind you of Aphex Twin or, again, the synths under ‘Ebb And Flow’. They all excel at giving the vocals something to fight against, it gives them their power.
Maria Lessing is a stunning vocalist. She could sing over the buzz of a piece of tracing paper wrapped around a comb and you’d be mesmerised. Not just because she’s a great singer, or because she can really scream, or that she can easily juggle a variety of styles, but because of the way she constructs her vocal parts. Every song here has a compelling verse and a chorus that grips you by both ears. Each is affecting and varied, with songs like ‘Tidal Wave’ or ‘Disintegrate’ feeling so emotional that they drag you into their orbit. The speedy, snappy ‘Nixy’ gives her opportunity to play with a pop-punk chorus. This hugely contrasts the screams on ‘Resurge’, and particularly the breakdown section of ‘Cyclone’, where she barks like a rabid dog – it’s absolutely vicious.
Obviously, being a trio, the work of the band’s drummer, Johannes Früchtenicht is essential in giving the songs shape and definition. It’s both tasteful and restrained, and the clever use of blastbeats gives the riffs added power.
Although the term ‘Rap Metal’ seems to have fallen out of favour, it’s the perfect description of the simple drum beat and snappy bars that define ‘The Shades’. It’s also another display of Lessing’s vocal power and proves the band can be versatile while still playing in the same sandbox.
While the record flows effortlessly, at track nine they encounter “the ‘Nightfall’ problem.” With a huge emotional chorus and a sobbing, sweaty screaming section, it’s such a gut-wrenching piece of catharsis that it feels like an ending, seemingly leaving the album nowhere to go. Yet, they seize the opportunity, using the gentle, glimmery synth parts that open ‘Symphony Of Clouds’ to usher momentum back in, bringing with it an air of grandeur. This continues with the piano-based ballad ‘Tidal Wave’, which, as its name suggests, crashes down in a huge emotional cascade. This leaves ‘Cyclone’ to close out the record. With a huge, bassy guitar riff – and a brilliant, heartrending chorus – it provides one final burst of emotion, making it easily one of their strongest songs, ending the album on its highest possible note.
The word ‘Resurgence’ means coming back stronger. It’s the perfect title for Future Palace’s fourth record, their strongest and most consistent work yet.
Plain White T’s are celebrating their classic track ‘Hey There Delilah’ with an updated version with added emotion from none other than LØLØ.
The song appeared on the band’s 2006 album ‘Every Second Counts’, and has gone on to become 4x Platinum in the US and 3x Platinum in the UK. It’s been streamed on Spotify almost 1.5 billion times, and the video for the track has been viewed 142 million times.
It’s a modern classic, basically.
But with this new version, the band don’t simply copy what they’ve already done; instead, they let LØLØ play the part of Delilah, offering a different perspective on the story being told. It shows that this isn’t just a stream of empty consciousness from the protagonist, but that the girl he is singing for reciprocates the feelings.
That following his dream is the right thing to do.
It’s a beautiful update on a special song, and one that celebrates who the band were but also who they continue to be.
Have a listen:
The band released their last full-length album ‘Plain White T’s’ back in 2023. Here’s ‘Fired Up’ from that very record.
LØLØ released her latest album ‘god forbid a girl spits out her feelings!’ earlier this year. Here is ‘dumbest girl in the world’ for your listening pleasure:
We’re back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we’ve got six more new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.
Dutch proggers Lesoir came out on top in a very tight race last week with the thought-provoking Is It Nothing? with US proggers Pattern-Seeking Animals in second place and with Arthur Brown’s effusive Bursting The Bubble in third.
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 – it 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 (please, don’t forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.
GREEN CARNATION – THE MESSIAH COMPLEX
Norwegian prog rockers Green Carnation complete their epic A Dark Poem trilogy with the release of Part III: The Messiah Complex through Season Of Mist on September 4. It’s been a colossal piece of work that has, by and large, made prog fans see the band in a new light. Ahead of the release of the third part of their triptych, they share new single and the album’s title track.
“The Messiah Complex is a standout song in the trilogy,” Nordhus says. “The vibe to this song is quite unique for us, but it doesn’t take long to recognise that it is still very much a Green Carnation song. Bjørn’s guitar work lifts the song up, together with Jonathan’s drumming and, of course, Stein Roger’s bass and vocals during the bridge.”
“The title track from Part III of A Dark Poem is about our need to find external excuses for our behaviour,” bassist and primary lyricist Stein Roger Sordal says. “This is nothing new, but with our uncritical way of working with our increasingly digital world, we seem unable to cope with the consequences of our actions.”
TEMIC – CEASED TO BE
International prog metal quintet Temic have announced they will release their second studio album, Ceiba, through Season Of Mist on October 2. The band have also shared a video for their new single, Ceased To Be, and have announced some live shows across Europe in October with Kingcrow, although disappointingly there’s no UK show as of yet!
“Ceased To Be is told from the perspective of someone who’s dying, while surrounded by their loved ones,” the band says. “Death is not feared nor resisted. Rather, it is observed as a sacred rite of passage. Ceiba is a concept album about loss in all its various forms. While more progressive than our first album, the songs are driven by honesty and emotions.”
DIKAJEE – GUNPOWDER
Multi-instrumentalist Dikajee has announced her return with a brand new album, The Frame, which will be out on 6th November. She’s also shared the first single, Gunpowder, which features guest appearances from Jethro Tull keyboardist Jonathan Noyce and Snarky Puppy’s Varijashree Venugopal, while Within Temptation drummer Vikram Shankar, Guillaume Bernard from Klone and German Vergara from Aisles all appear on the album.
“The Gunpowder video is a story of overcoming the limits of the mind and body,” says Olga Karpova. “The Blind will see, the Child will light the fires and the Ghost will have a face again. This is the life of a human”
KAVUS TORABI – WATER INTO WINE
Gong and Utopia Strong frontman Kavus Torabi will release his new solo album, October By Name, on October 2 through his Believer’s Roast label. If the first single to be taken from the album is anything to go by, it’s going to be a splendid listen. Water Into Wine is a delightfully summery slice of psychedelia that evokes memories of Syd Barrett and Julian Cope at their finest and leaves the listener with a huge grin plastered across their face.
“Perhaps there is no free will, and we’re all just playing out the consequences of our genes, insecurities and childhood damage,” Torabi reflects on the fundamentals of the song. “But I have to believe change is possible because, honestly, what’s the point in anything if it isn’t?”
KING GIZZARD & THE WIZARD LIZARD – ALIEN METAL
Fans of Aussie psych pranksters King Gizzard will be well aware of the band’s fondness for genre-hopping, although more staid proggers may be less enthralled. The news that their upcoming twenty-eighth album, Alien Metal, due to be released later in the summer on p(doom) records, has been inspired by the band’s ‘rave shows’ from last year. If you’re a fan of Pure Reason Revolution’s Hammer And Anvil album or no-man’s Love You To Bits, then chances are you’ll love this too. If not, maybe it’s not for you…
“It completely rewired my brain,” says Gizzard’s Stu Mackenzie, having discovered the possibilities of the Eurorack synthesiser format on the recommendation of fellow band member and self-confessed ‘techno head of the group’ Joey Walker. “I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch’.”
CASTLE MOUNTAIN MOON – A LAYMAN’S GUIDE TO UNOBTAINIUM
German prog duo Castle Mountain Moon have announced that they will release their second album, A Layman’s Guide To Unobtainium, on September 4. The album explores maps—those that guide us, those that mislead us, and those that ultimately point toward things that can never truly be possessed. The pair have been joined on the new album by drummer Garry Wassong, and have shared a lyric video for the title track.
“We wrote about something that, by definition, only exists when you don’t have it,” explains Dirk Krause, one half of the pairing of the software engineers turned musicians. “Still, we chase it—so somebody had to write a manual in layman’s terms and hide it in the music, right before our eyes.”
The Anchoress releases her brand new album, As We Once Were, through Last Night From Glasgow Records on August 7.
And Prog has teamed up with Catherine Anne Davies to offer readers an exclusive t-shirt bundle that you won’t be able to purchase anywhere else! You’ll get a fantastic Anchoress As We Once Were t-shirt, exclusive to Prog readers and one you won’t find on merch stands or other webstores, a lyric sheet for Stop The World from the new album, signed by Catherine herself, and an issue of Prog 172, with a bespoke Anchoress front cover.
As We Once Were is The Anchoress’s third studio release, following on from the acclaimed Confessions Of A Romance Novelist (2016), for which Catherine won the Limelight Award at the 2016 Progressive Music Awards, and The Art Of Losing (2021), which Prog writers voted their album of the year!
As We Once Were is a thought-provoking and intelligently crafted set of progressive-flavoured songs that saw her working on some of Pete Townshend‘s vintage synthesisers
“There was also this sort of dual congruence through my old recordings and these old analogue instruments from the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Catherine tells Prog in the new issue. “When you work with an old analogue synth, it can take two and a half hours to get to a specific sound. There’s a really long, extended coda section of What You Did– with modern synthesisers, you can save your preset and go back to it, but with these older analogue synths there’s this sense of grabbing onto gold dust as it’s coming through your fingers.
“These instruments’ circuits are so unstable – nobody else could get exactly the same sound as you, and it feels like if you don’t record it in the moment it’s going to disappear. Which felt so conceptually resonant.”
Built around towering vocals, atmospheric guitars, and a chorus that rises out of a darker, more intimate opening, Sun Goes Down – the debut song by Seattle-based heavy rock artist Dave Monroe – explores what it feels like to keep searching for change while fighting your own mind. Rather than offering easy answers, Sun Goes […]
As we get closer and closer to the release of their debut album, PRESIDENT are turning up the ante with the release of a soaring new offering.
Titled ‘dark heaven’, it is another example of the line that the band straddle so brilliantly. Emotional and anthemic, yet crushing and cathartic, it is a hefty, honest and hedonistic dive into the backwards nature of faith and religion, a key topic that has influenced so much of the project’s story up until now.
PRESIDENT had this to say about it:
“‘dark heaven’ is a reflection on the contradictions of faith, and how something intended to unite humanity has so often been used to justify division, violence, and power. It’s about the way greed can wear the mask of righteousness. It isn’t an attack on belief itself; it’s about searching for something real beneath the noise, and asking what remains when certainty begins to crumble.”
The video is also sensational, showing off the song being played for fans of the band for the first time. A direct connection between artist and audience.
The track is taken from PRESIDENT’s upcoming debut album ‘Blood of Your Empire’, which will be unleashed on September 04 via Atlantic Records.
‘City Of Lights‘ is the title track of City Of Lights‘ self-titled, sophomore release which will be released on October 23rd, 2026. City Of Lights formed in 2018 when British songwriter/rhythm guitarist Neil Austin reached out to Greek vocal sensation Manos Fatsis to see if he would be interested in singing on some demos. The […]
ASOMVEL have released their fierce new single ‘Lone Wolf’, the latest song to be taken from their forthcoming album ‘Set Your World On Fire‘ out October 1st. ‘Lone Wolf’ is a fist to the jaw hard rock anthem capturing the spirit and freedom of taking on the world alone. The band are far from on […]
Built around towering vocals, atmospheric guitars, and a chorus that rises out of a darker, more intimate opening, Sun Goes Down – the debut song by Seattle-based heavy rock artist Dave Monroe – explores what it feels like to keep searching for change while fighting your own mind. Rather than offering easy answers, Sun Goes […]