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Might I suggest a tour with Sun Dont Shine?

The post 311’s Tim Mahoney & Chad Sexton Launch New Band Sun Will Shine appeared first on Theprp.com.

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Some collaborations happen overnight. This one took the best part of a decade and change.

Steve Rothery and Steve Hackett first floated the idea of making a record together roughly 11 years ago. Recording itself stretched across eight of those years, squeezed between Marillion tours, Genesis anniversary shows and whatever else two of prog rock’s most recognizable guitarists had cluttering their calendars. The result, The Roaring Waves, finally arrived as seven instrumental tracks built around a single, sprawling subject: the sea.

“It’s not the kind of album that guitarists normally make together,” Hackett said of the record. “I suspect that most guitarists tend to make albums where people try to outplay each other and show their chops to an enormous degree. I’ll be very interested to see what the reaction is from fans. If you’re expecting something typically proggy, I don’t think this is it. It’s more cinematic, almost ambient at times.”

Rothery and Hackett were already friends, in the habit of getting together to talk shop long before any tape rolled. Early sessions happened whenever both men’s schedules lined up, which, given their day jobs, was not often. Everything shifted once Hackett‘s keyboardist, Riccardo Romano, started sitting in. Romano ended up doing double duty, later engineering and mixing the finished record.

“It meant that we started to sound like a band, you know, three people in a room making a noise,” Hackett told Rodrigo Altaf of Sonic Perspectives. “That works very well. If it’s just two people, you’re relying on technology completely. But it meant that we were having a three-way conversation rather than a two-way conversation. And I think that that was key to bringing everything in, really.”

Neither guitarist came in with a stack of finished songs. That was intentional. Hackett contrasted the free-form sessions with his old Genesis days, when he would typically arrive with material already mapped out.

“When I did Selling England by the Pound with Genesis, my home life was very difficult at that time,” he said. “Usually I would have shown up with a few songs written for Genesis. But then at that time, I had just a few riffs. And those were the things that engaged the band. So sometimes for a band and for collaborations, less is more.”

That philosophy extended to keeping their egos out of the way. Two guitarists this decorated could easily have turned the record into a technical pissing contest. Neither wanted that.

“We know those guys can play very, very fast, and that’s part of the stock in trade,” Hackett said, pointing to shredders in general rather than any name in particular. “But then there’s also this other area that was baffling to me when I first heard Fleetwood Mac doing this track called ‘Albatross’ all those years ago. Hardly a shred fest. If you play sometimes very gently, and just add a few notes, it can be very effective. I think the beauty of the guitar is, it’s something my mother says to me, funnily enough: don’t forget about that one note, that one note that you can do that is the killer.”

He name-checked Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton as players who mastered the art of the sustained note, singling out Clapton‘s solo on “I’m Your Witch Doctor” with John Mayall as an early example of restraint doing more than speed ever could.

If Hackett brought the restraint, Rothery brought the setting. He grew up in Whitby, on England’s northeast coast, and the sea has clearly never left him: “In winter you could hear the roaring of the waves during the stormy weather,” he said. “Whitby was a very evocative place to live, a very poetic and powerful place to grow up. So I suppose this record is a way of expressing some of those memories and emotions about what the sea meant to me.”

He expanded on just how central that duality is to the record, describing the sea as something that refuses to stay one thing for long.

“The sea has many moods,” Rothery said. “It can be tranquil and beautiful, with the sun setting over the horizon. It can be an angry, vicious monster who just wants to pull you back, pull you down to the bottom of the sea. Growing up by the sea, seeing the bravery of the lifeboat crews who launched these inflatable dinghies into terrible weather conditions to try and save someone’s life, the sheer scale of that human spirit against the sea, it’s quite humbling.”

Whitby’s isolation shaped him too. He didn’t travel much beyond it until he joined the band Meridian at 19, and even a small cargo ship pulling into the harbor carried an outsized sense of wonder for a kid who rarely left town.

The opener, “The Storm,” grew out of a jam at Hackett‘s Racket Club studio: Hackett supplied the riff, Rothery layered what he calls “weird noises and melodies” over it, and Romano built the chord sequence underneath.

“It just developed in quite a painless way,” Rothery said. “That song embraces the whole ethos of what we’re doing, that cinematic kind of approach. Our styles combined quite seamlessly; we just played off each other. There’s a section at the end where the two guitars are intertwining and dancing off each other, and there’s this great sensitivity and mutual respect there in our playing.”

“The Black Sea” leans hardest into that cinematic instinct. Hackett has said he’d happily see it soundtrack a spy film, and the influence isn’t subtle: “We were talking about having been influenced by film composers, particularly John Barry. It’s almost like a spy movie soundtrack. It’s deliberately slow, murky, sinister. Instead of starting slow and suddenly going very fast, it becomes more poignant as I start to add phrases that sound like they were played backwards rather than forwards.” He credited a Fernandes guitar with a built-in sustainer pickup for the effect, a piece of gear he’d been chasing for two decades. “It was a 20-year wait, but it was worth it.”

Elsewhere, “K-129” tackles the doomed final voyage of a Soviet submarine, its Cold War conspiracy theories baked right into the atmosphere Rothery built around it, while “Sandsend” is named for the stretch of coast near where he grew up, a place he eventually walked with Hackett to show him where it all started.

“Red Dragon” flips the mood entirely, opening with a droning instrument most listeners mistake for bagpipes. Hackett said the sound actually came from a session where Rothery stumbled onto it by accident, and the pair reworked it so it could be played from a keyboard. He connected the East India Trading Company reference behind the track to his choice of sitar guitar, chasing a slightly psychedelic, slightly Indian texture.

The album closes on “Pacific Coast Highway,” a loose, harmonica-led jam that started as two separate pieces Rothery and Hackett stitched together. Hackett plays the harmonica himself, while Rothery switched to bass for the track. Both men’s families sing on the outro.

“That might raise a few eyebrows in the why are they doing this department,” Hackett joked. “It sounds like they smoked some stuff, but we didn’t. We were sober throughout, your honour.”

For Rothery, The Roaring Waves fits neatly alongside a run of instrumental, soundtrack-minded work, including Bioscope, his collaboration with Thorsten Quaeschning, and his 2014 solo album Ghosts of Pripyat: “Once there’s this thing that happens, once you name a track, once you give it an identity, it almost whispers in your ear what it needs to complete itself,” he told Altaf. “I think that’s very true of this kind of music in particular. Once it’s defined, it wants to be born.”

The cover art, painted by Simon Ward, mirrors that idea in a single image: a small boat cutting through violent, squalling waves, its lights barely visible against the black.

Both guitarists have plenty else going on. Rothery recently played Pompeii with Marillion, a show he called mind-blowing and extremely hot, backed by an Italian choir for the second half of the set. A new Marillion album is in the works too, though mixing has slipped from a Christmas target to somewhere around late spring or early summer, with UK, Netherlands and France tour dates landing first.

Hackett remains equally stacked, with an upcoming UK tour, Italian dates, a return to America and another Royal Albert Hall show on the books, plus Lally Larson stepping in on keyboards in place of Roger King. He’s also close to finishing a solo album and has an acoustic record in the works.

As for a follow-up to The Roaring Waves itself, don’t hold your breath. Both guitarists say vague ideas exist, and both would love to eventually play the record live, but with schedules this packed, 2028 is the earliest realistic window for either.

Given it took 11 years just to get here, that might actually count as fast.

The post STEVE HACKETT & STEVE ROTHERY Talk Not Trying To Outdo Each Other During Recordings Of Recent Collaborative Album: “Not Much Great Music Comes From That” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

“Boston,” the breakout single by country-ish singer-songwriter Stella Lefty, sounds like an inevitable hit because it already was one. The song, a pleasant ditty about taking a chance on love, includes an interpolation of Noah Kahan’s massive hit “Stick Season.” That helped “Boston” become massive itself: on TikTok and social media, as well as the more traditional venues of airplay on pop and country formats across the country. (If you’re wondering, Boston is being very normal about this.) 

The post Stella Lefty’s Personality Vacuum appeared first on Stereogum.

In addition to shows with Mushroomhead, Fear Factory, Primer 55, Eyes Set To Kill and more.

The post Sicksense Confirm Fall Headlining Shows appeared first on Theprp.com.

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The highly anticipated second album from the Gippsland’s metalcore crushers Ocean Sleeper is out now.

Recorded across studios in Melbourne, LA and Portland, Peace When I’m Dead (BMG/Rise) hits stores and all digital platforms today, with their Aussie tour next month on the verge of selling out.

After the Australian dates, Ocean Sleeper head out on a 23-date US tour with Nevertel followed immediately by their stint on the Hellbound Cruise. January and February sees them on the road through the UK, Ireland and Europe.

Get the album now and check out the most recent single Every Part of Me below.

Conquest Music (Release Date 21.8.26) Bernie Marsden’s passing three years ago still hits hard, not least as he still had much to offer musically, and there have been a stream of recent releases, some of them posthumous.  A brilliant guitarist … Continue reading →

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