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Welcome to Prog‘s brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we’ve got seven more new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Well, what a battle we had on our hands last week! And huge congratulations to Bulgarian proggers Untold Stories, whose Pale Horizons edged ahead of Alex Henry Foster to win last week. And in third place, we had US prog metal quintet Outrun The Sunlight who pipped fellow US band North Sea Echoes by the closest of margins to grab third place. Well done all!

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.

THE PINEAPPLE THIEF – HOLD THE ASHES

The new single from The Pineapple Thief, Hold The Ashes, is the band’s first release since signing to InsideOut Music, and although there’s no news about a new studio album yet, Prog understands the band have recently completed work on their as-yet-untitled sixteenth album. So it doesn’t take much to connect the dots and reckon this is a taster for the new album. Sounds really good, too…

“One thing is certain, one day we’ll all be ashes,” says signer and guitarist Bruce Soord, cheerily. “It’s the ‘gift from the gods that comes to us all’. For some reason, when writing this song, I couldn’t stop singing about ‘ashes’ in the context of understanding what life is about. ‘Writhing in constant conflict’. Why? So take these ashes and scatter them far and wide. You know, make the most of it.”

CHANGING PLACES IN THE FIRE – HOME

Changing Places In The Fire are a Venezuelan quintet who will release their self-titled debut album through Wild Thing Records on July 24. As you will hear from the band’s latest single, Home, they meld muscular prog rock – think Tool, laced with Porcupine Tree, with more expansive post-rock moments which bring to mind the much-missed Oceansize. We reckon they’re in to a winner here…

“Home reflects on distance, guilt, and memory – on the ghosts that follow long after leaving,” explains keyboardist Alfredo Ovalles. “It confronts the ache of belonging to a place you can’t fully return to, and carrying that absence forward.”

SOURCE – OPTIMISTIC

If you’re going to cover a song like Radiohead’s Optimistic, then you’d better be prepared for some scrutiny. Fortunately, this Boulder, Colorado trio have got the chops and deliver a thoroughly engaging version. The band talk of their music in terms of “heavy psychedelic prog rock” and they’ve released four albums thus far, with new single, Optimistic, nodding ahead to a fifth.

“When we decided to cover Optimistic, we really wanted to showcase our love for the song while bringing our own voice to the arrangement,” the band say. “I think our version has a lot of similar ingredients, but the way we choose to highlight those ingredients really displays our unique approach and sound. The tones are much heavier, the tempo is faster so it feels like there’s more energy, and the way we flip the ending into a heavy riff is my favourite part of our version.”

RAPHAEL WEINROTH-BROWNE – FALL FOR ME

Not one but two covers this week! Canadian cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne offers up his take on Sleep Token’s Fall For Me, the video set against the stunning backdrop of Ontario bathed in golden sunlight. Sleep Token divides the prog world, mostly, we suspect, because they seem to have emerged from the metal world despite evidently not being a metal band, but Weinroth-Browne offers a take on the song that’s probably far more palatable to prog fans, all the while managing to keep his shirt on for a promo video. No mean feat in itself!

“Fall For Me is a hidden gem in Sleep Token’s catalogue – its gorgeous melodies and rich choral harmonies lend themselves perfectly to the cello. In reimagining this song, I tried to convey the same juxtaposition of sadness and beauty that makes the original so poignant,” he says. “The music video was shot at the epic Eagles’ Nest Lookout in rural Ontario by Ben Kissner of Monscene Studios. My face was completely devoured by mosquitoes and black flies by the end of the shoot, but I believe it was worth it for the final result!”

PRINCE OF FAILURE – PHANTOM

Prince of Failure is the new collaborative project featuring TesseracT singer Daniel Tompkins and Paul Ortiz from Chimp Spanner, and they’ve just released their self-titled debut album through Kscope. It’s an album rooted in deep ideas, based around neurodivergence, masking, and the psychological weight of living out of alignment with expectation

“Phantom explores the fight against the darker forces that live both within and around us. It’s about being haunted by destructive impulses, temptation, and the feeling of losing control to something that seems impossible to escape,” Tompkins explains. “Within the wider story of the album, it represents a descent into chaos – the moment where the protagonist is forced to confront the parts of himself he’s tried to suppress, only to realise that the battle may already be consuming him. Themes of conflict, self-destruction, and overwhelming power run throughout the song, creating a sense of inevitable collapse as everything begins to burn around him.”

MAYA ONGAKU – ASTRAL ECHOES

Anyone who’s been suffering during the heatwave that’s been hitting the UK this past week might find the gentle melodies of Astral Echoes something of a balm. it’s the new single from Japanese psych tri Maya Ongaku, who will release their new album Nothing Space Music on August 7 (digitally) and September 9 (physically) via Guruguru Brain. The band draw inspiration from the experimental rock of the 1960s and 70s, Japanese folk and psychedelia, avant-garde art movements, literature, philosophy, and cultural anthropology, and this all sounds rather wonderful.

“Astral Echoes explores the moment when art comes into being — when inspiration quietly enters the mind,” the band state. “I believe inspiration is not something to be chased or seized, but something that emerges when we patiently wait for its arrival in silence.”

DATURA LODGE – STONE

Datura Lodge are a brand new prog duo from Bergen County, New Jersey. The enigmatically named Nicky B and “W” will release their self-titled debut album through Arquen Records on October 2. The album has been produced by the band and Ben Karas from Thank You Scientist, who also adds violin to this single, which, according to the band, “fulfils the ‘rock’ component of their progressive sound.”

“I was listening to Lou Reed’s ‘middle-aged man era’ albums a lot and love how his lyrics are rooted in reality but also very funny,” explains “W”. “Stone is my third-rate impression of that.”

In 2004, former Guns N’ Roses bandmates Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum were all out of their old group, presumably never to return. But with wayward Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland onboard, they launched the supergroup Velvet Revolver –even if, as Slash told Classic Rock at the time, their future was as unpredictable as their past.

Slash is talking in his familiar, woozy SoCal drawl. “Hey,” he says, “it’s the second day of this fucking two-day picture shoot, man. You can always tell when you got a record coming out, because all this bullshit starts up again…”

As laid-back and straight as he might be these days, the guitarist can’t keep the excitement out of his voice when he talks about this particular new record of his, though. Because for all of the knockabout rock’n’roll kicks of his band Snakepit and the many other GN’R spin-offs and side projects he’s been involved in, Velvet Revolver represents a return to the big-time for assorted members of two of the last decade’s biggest bands: Guns N’ Roses and Stone Temple Pilots.

Slash and ex-GN’R bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum began jamming around again in 2001. As their writing gathered momentum and the good vibes returned, in his head Slash began hearing one particular voice singing their material: that of Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. Slash sent the STP singer a CD of some of their songs, and word came back that Weiland liked them very much.

It was never going to be that easy, though. It took Weiland a year to disentangle himself from the mess that STP had become. The GN’R three had by then become four with the addition of guitarist Dave Kushner, a friend of Slash’s since junior high school.

“Eventually,” Slash says, “after we’d been through this tortuous process of trying to find a singer, doing however many fucking auditions, we got this offer to do a couple of movie soundtracks. So I said to Scott, ‘Let’s just hang out and make music. But right from the start it was this great thing – that doesn’t usually happen twice. It was very organic and natural. We hooked up in April last year and we wrote over the summer. We did one gig just for the fuck of it, and that really cemented it. You can sometimes get away with shit in the studio, but there’s nowhere to hide up on stage. It was just that chemistry right away. Why we all work together, I don’t know.”

The gig was at a small theatre, the El Rey in Los Angeles, and it was the first time that Slash had ever seen Weiland sing live; the singer’s skill and passion enthralled him. With the deal sealed, the band recorded their forthcoming debut album, Contraband, in the last three months of 2003, co-producing with Josh Abraham. They boiled down the final running order from some 50 original songs.

“I’m telling you, every fucking track of these twelve is something different,” Slash says of the results. “It’s like a journey. There are no fillers. Every song has its own vibe. It’s a really fucking killer record.”

The stand-out tunes are Slither, a song that Weiland describes as having “that STP vibe”, and Falling To Pieces, a show-stopping ballad in the manner of GN’R’s November Rain. There’s even “an older punk track”, Illegal Eye.

Weiland, too, has been seduced by the combination of sounds: “It’s a true representation of STP’s music and also the best of Guns N’ Roses’ music when they were at their best – vicious, streamlined, living off strippers.”

Just one dark cloud has blighted this idyllic horizon: as the band worked on the album, Weiland had to go back into rehab, falling victim once again to his well-known junk habit. It meant that Slash and co were once more working with a singer whose behaviour was affecting the course of their professional lives. How come?

“In reality Scott’s dealing with stuff,” Slash replies. “He’s such an amazing talent.”

Clean again, Weiland is back taking a full part in the build-up to the album’s release. However, the true test will come when the band hit the road. Plans include some low-key English and European dates around the release of the album, followed by some extensive work in America.

“I would like to think that being in the band has helped Scott,” Slash says. “But you would have to ask him. I hope that working with us has made it a little easier, man. I mean, shit, we’ve all had our problems in the past.”

Velvet Revolver are attempting to absorb those lessons and learn from them, in both a personal and business sense.

“As naïve as it sounds, we didn’t want any of this bullshit about X amount of dollars for this or whatever; all the obvious things,” says Slash. “My whole thing was just to have a fucking amazing rock’n’roll band. Scott was the only guy who had that voice, what we thought was a genuine rock’n’roll voice. For most artists today it’s not about rock’n’roll any more, but it is for us. I don’t care about baggage or any of that shit. It’s not my big concern what everyone is going to think. I don’t have time to sort them all out. I just want the record to come out and to go on the road. I don’t care what size theatres or arenas or whatever, just fucking play, man. That’s what it’s about, after all.

“We lost sight of that in Guns. Once we’d played a stadium, Axl would never go back, it was stadiums or nothing. But to me it’s about being close to the crowd, too. I thought I’d got it out of my system with Snakepit, which was a kind of haphazard, thrown together thing, but it never really goes.”

To that end, Velvet Revolver are expected to play in the UK later in 2004.

“Hey, you gotta remember I was born there, man,” Slash says. “Stoke-on-Trent. And we just have very warm feelings about it there, from that first time with Guns. I just feel partial to the place. It seems like people take you at face value there.”

And with that, Slash is off to face the cameras and kick the big machine into action.  

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 64