We’re back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week after a break last week as we were at a great Prog For Peart festival! This week we’ve got six more new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Asia romped away with our last TOTW poll with their brand new single, The Traveller (Into The Light), pulling in double the amount of votes to their nearest rival. Not a bad start for the new line-up! That nearest rival was UK prog metallers Winter In Eden in second place, with London quintet Crumbling Ghost in 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 – 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.
CHELSEA WOLFE – COLD
The enigmatic Chelsea Wolfe announced that she will release her latest album, The Dark, on August 21 through Loma Vista Recordings. She has also released a video for her latest single, Cold, a hauntingly melodic ballad that will hopefully help break her deserving music to a wider audience.
Wolfe describes the new record as “an album imbued with mystery, symbolism, and solace.” The Dark features guest appearances from Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails), Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam), Troy Van Leeuwen (Queens Of The Stone Age), Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), and Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Nine Inch Nails, St Vincent).
LESOIR – IS IT NOTHING?
Dutch art rockers Lesoir will release their brand new album, Tomorrow Is Now Today, through V2 Records on October 23, and Is It Nothing? is the first music to be taken from the upcoming album, the band’s seventh over all.
Is It Nothing? explores humanity’s relationship with Earth through progressive rock, atmospheric textures and cinematic soundscapes. Inspired by scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, Is It Nothing? reflects on Earth as a living, self-regulating organism and examines humanity’s willingness to recognise the urgency of change.
PATTERN-SEEKING ANIMALS – TRAVELER ON THE WRONG ROAD
US prog rockers Pattern-Seeking Animals have shared a great new single, Traveler On The Wrong Road (their spelling, not ours!), which is taken from the band’s seventh album, Grimalkin, which is released through GEP Records on August 21.
“The word ‘Grimalkin’ originated in 16th-century English as a variation of ‘graymalkin’ (grey cat) and was later popularised by Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the name of one of the witches’ familiars, a cat companion with magical and supernatural associations,” explains producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter John Boegehold. “It’s great to finally have a release date for Grimalkin, our sixth album since 2019. We’re all very happy with the way it turned out. Along the way we tried a few new musical directions and sounds, some different instrumentation.”
ARTHUR BROWN – BURSTING THE BUBBLE
That old God Of Hellfire himself, Arthur Brown, gets all jaunty on his latest single, Bursting The Bubble. It’s taken from his upcoming album, Nature, which is released through Prophecy Productions on September 4. Arthur will be appearing at Prophecy Fest that weekend, as well as touring with Alice Cooper in the UK in October.
“Does the planet Earth need us and our media?,” Brown asks. “Is AI becoming a better guardian of the Earth than humanity? Have we lost the imagination to care for our world, its creatures, and ourselves? So many of us now live inside a media bubble. Who does that truly serve? Can we still protect ourselves mentally, emotionally and spiritually against the growing feeling that nothing works anymore? Is this becoming our normal state of mind? This music video is deliberately shot vertically. Balloons are drawing our gaze upward, while our feet remain firmly rooted on the natural ground. It is both an artistic choice and a social commentary, inviting us to reflect on the way we now see ourselves, each other, and the world around us. What is reality?”
RUSSIAN CIRCLES – ELUVIAL
After the no-nonsense blast of previous single, Empath, US post-rock trio Russian Circles are in more familiar exploratory and proggier territory with the eight-minute-plus Eluvial, a slow-building, intricate piece taken from the band’s upcoming album, Nine, which is released through Sargent House on August 28.
For Nine, the band adhered to their strategy from Blood Year (2019) and Gnosis (2022) by teaming up with engineer Kurt Ballou (Converge, Mastodon, High on Fire), who they’ve worked with since 2016 and their broad-ranging influences – the formidable Touch & Go artists of the Midwest, the prog giants of late 60s and early 70s England, the hypnotic motorik and kosmische grooves of West Germany, and the international underground’s most caustic strains of metal – are writ large all over Nine.
HYPNO5E – LOST FIRES
French proggers Hypno5e release their latest album, Tame Noir, through Pelagic Records on November 6. They’ve launched the album with the epic, near-nine-minute Lost Fires and its accompanying cinematic video. From the tracks opkaitinve keyboard opening through to the climactic heavy guitars, it evokes memories of the band’s dual inspirations of Pink Floyd and Gojira. Parts may be a bit heavy for some, but overall there’s no denying the impact of Lost Fires.
“This music video is built as a short film,” the band explain. “The decor around the character slowly enters a mutable space, and unfolds as an extension of the unseen. As its contours shift and dissolve, buried layers of the self begin to emerge, not as memories to be reclaimed, but as quiet, elusive presences that have always existed beneath perception. The landscape becomes a threshold where the visible and the invisible continuously reshape one another, revealing an interior world in perpetual transformation. Rather than offering answers, the film embraces disorientation as a way of encountering what lies dormant, allowing the unknown to surface with the unsettling familiarity of something that was never truly lost.”
