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Canadian prog metal elders Protest The Hero have returned with what’s described as their most expansive and ambitious work yet, after more than half a decade of unplanned absence. Within explores their revised line-up via a series of cinematic arrangements, orchestral interludes and bold melodic experimentation. Vocalist Rody Walker and guitarist Luke Hoskin discuss breaking ties with their management and their reinvention as a fully independent band.

“As above, so below; as within, so without; as the universe, so the soul”: With this axiom as their guiding light, Protest The Hero have emerged from the wilderness after six long years of wandering, a new offering titled Within held up to their eager acolytes for examination.

“Yes, the title’s based on the Hermetic maxim, but that’s like a whole bunch of pretentious nonsense,” says vocalist and lyricist Rody Walker with a grin. “When I’m sitting and typing what shit is about, I’m just incredibly dramatic about it. Ultimately, I wanted to write this record about how all of the bigger things affect us individually, in our little inner worlds. That went really well with ‘as within, so without’ – conceptually, it’s about the larger world affecting the individual, specifically in relation to myself and my life.”

The lyrical outlier is lead single Mouthpiece which provides an explosive reintroduction to the prog metal luminaries. It still fits within the general theme, but with more of an external viewpoint. “We have all these voices in our ears telling us what to think and it’s causing us to fight with our families and friends and excommunicate one another,” Walker explains. “People who were more conservative and people who were more progressive could have this communicative nature where we could discuss things and maybe not agree. It wasn’t so fucking hostile.”

The song – like most of the album – bursts from the speakers in a flawless welter of intertwining guitars, sinuous rhythms and vocals that veer from larynx-shredding screams to clean, soaring peaks. In short, it’s nothing unfamiliar to longtime fans. “Oh God, no, dude. It’s the same thing we’ve always done: fast, complicated bullshit,” the singer says with a laugh.

“We leaned back into our punk roots and I think that’s really important for us because it’s the one thing musically we all agree on,” adds guitarist Luke Hoskin. “The songcraft is great and there’s so much melody in it that sometimes metal doesn’t offer, so you’ll hear a lot of that on this record too.”

There’s certainly songcraft and melody on offer, but the busy, blazing technicality that helped define the modern progressive metalcore sound is right to the fore. And, while there might not be too many stylistic deviations on this particular outing, it seems like there might well be more to come from the band soon.

Within comprises just six full tracks plus two strategically placed orchestral interludes titled i: above and ii: below. Hoskin reveals they “hint at something else that’s not on the album.” The pair decline to provide details, but the guitarist adds: “There’s more than meets the eye with this release. The themes on those orchestral pieces are things that no one’s heard yet, but they’ll be able to connect them later.”

Reddit-dwelling superfans have theories – but at the very least a companion piece seems likely. Asked if we can definitively expect more music to follow this in less than six years, Hoskin replies with a laugh: “Oh, yeah. Probably four and a half. A lot of what is coming is either done or in the works, but there’s still work to do.”

A duology or more would help make up for the long wait for this album, which Walker seems largely at a loss to explain. “We released Palimpsest during the pandemic and then what else did we have to do other than drink whisky in the basement? We should have been locking in, but we just didn’t. And then life kind of happened. A handful of us have kids, some of us are working other jobs now; but there’s no real excuse.”

When it did come time to start writing, it was Hoskin who began the process while his bandmates were on one of the number of sporadic tours they’ve continued to play. Protest The Hero never went on a hiatus or disappeared entirely, but the guitarist announced he was stepping away from live shows in 2021.Asked whether he regrets that decision, especially with a new album to take out, he replies in the negative.

“Especially playing new material because at some point that became a huge source of anxiety for me,” he adds. “I do miss hanging out with the fellas and the constant laughter and being able to disconnect from the real world for a bit. But I wouldn’t say I have any regrets; I like the situation we’re in now where there’s a division of labour. While those guys are out touring, I can be at home working on new riffs and the business side of things.”

That division of labour is marked, with there essentially being two different iterations of the band at this point in time. Hoskin and Walker are joined on the album by longtime collaborator Cameron McLelland on bass and Intervals drummer Nathan Bulla. The vocalist is the only common thread between that line-up and the live band, which also features guitarist Ben Davis, bassist Henry Selva and drummer Matt Kidby. Longtime guitarist Tim MacMillar will also be out on the road, but wasn’t involved in the recording process.

“Our friend Milen [Petzelt-Sorace] is a composer, and he and I are a little writing team,” Hoskin explains. “It just ended up that Milen and I dug into it a little more and a little faster, and when I talked to Tim about recording, he was like, ‘This is your thing, so just go and do it.’”

“We also want the live experience to be a little looser and that’s why we get to bring in guys like ‘HK’ [Kidby] on the drums, who’s a more punk drummer in his heart,” Walker adds. “It’s not as rigid. Sometimes the songs are a little faster than they should be. It’s interesting how the division has been created, but it all works to create this bigger idea.”

When it comes to the business side, Hoskin needs all the extra time he can get. The band previously crowdfunded 2013’s Volition and released a series of tracks on a subscription format that were later gathered together as 2016’s Pacific Myth. This, though, is the first time they’ve released an album entirely independently.

“We’e spent every moment since we were tied to some label in some way,” Walker says. “I’m not speaking ill of any of those labels, because a lot of the situations were great, but we are finally free from any obligation.”

“We don’t even have management now,” Hoskin adds. “It’s created a lot more work, but it’s cool because now we’re in control of our success or failure. It’s very empowering, but it has been a lot.”

It’s an exciting time for fans of the modern breed of progressive metal. Many of its originators have re-emerged, with the likes of Textures breaking hiatus and Paul Ortiz, aka Chimp Spanner, teaming up with TesseracT vocalist Daniel Tompkins in Prince Of Failure.

“What I really like about the scene is that the older guys are still coming out with great music and pushing prog forward,” says Hoskin. “I’m thinking Opeth and Devin Townsend and Haken. Devin’s new record is a masterpiece, but he’s his own thing and he always has been.”

And are Protest The Hero happy to take on the mantle of prog metal elder statesmen? “Oh fuck, is that what we are?” says Walker, laughing.

“We’ll own it,” says Hoskin. “I’m just satisfied being alive and making music, so if someone looks at us as being an older band now, who cares?”

Fireball is often treated as the awkward middle child of the Deep Purple Mark II catalogue, sandwiched between the twin classics In Rock and Machine Head. Yet it was with Fireball, written and recorded amid relentless touring, mounting commercial expectations, personal frustrations and a determination not to repeat themselves, that Deep Purple tested just how far they could push the boundaries of hard rock. Encompassing foundational heavy metal alongside elements of progressive, jazz, psychedelic and even country rock, it was the band’s first album to top the UK chart and became another of their million-sellers.

Work on Fireball began in September 1970, barely three months after the release of In Rock. Martin Birch was again behind the recording desk, while production remained firmly in the band’s own hands. There was no stockpile of finished songs waiting to be recorded. Like its predecessor, Fireball would emerge gradually from the group’s collective writing sessions, taking shape over the following nine months at De Lane Lea and Olympic studios in London between an increasingly punishing schedule of British, European and American tour dates.

In this regard, the band’s success had become both a blessing and a burden. “In Rock succeeded so magnificently that it’s kept us working from that day to this,” Jon Lord reflected in early 1973. “We’ve really not had a chance to take stock since then.”

If In Rock had finally confirmed Deep Purple’s true musical identity, Fireball found them refusing to be confined by it. Lord recognised the change before the album had even been released.

“This album is more mellow than Deep Purple In Rock,” he told the NME in August 1971. “When we recorded that, we were a bit angry at the world because nobody had taken any notice of us.”

Instead of repeating or refining the formula that had transformed their fortunes, Fireball placed greater emphasis on the musicians’ collective strengths while pushing the emerging hard rock genre into unfamiliar territory.

The opening title track repurposes the momentum of Speed King (from In Rock), and takes its exhilarating sense of controlled chaos several steps further. Propelled by Ian Paice’s relentless – and revolutionary – double-bass drum pattern and Roger Glover’s elegantly striding bass line, it remains one of the most startling, high-energy performances of the Mark II era. Glover’s lunatic, fuzzed-up bass break, where you might reasonably expect a guitar solo, underlines the point that this is not a conventional guitar-hero album, so much as the work of five exceptional musicians discovering just how powerful they could be as a group.

Released as a single in October 1971, Fireball’s title track reached No.15 in the UK chart, a populist triumph which also pushed the hard-rock musical vocabulary towards territory that later generations would come to recognise as speed metal. After seeing Deep Purple in Copenhagen in 1973, a nine-year-old Lars Ulrich bought the album the next morning. “I started with that and I didn’t look back,” the future Metallica drummer recalled.

If the title track establishes a new high-energy benchmark, The Mule confirmed the band were working on a far broader canvas than straightforward hard rock. One of only three tracks on the original album’s second side, it unfolded like a musical odyssey, shifting between crashing, crushing riffs, eerie electronic effects and stretches of improvisation. The stereo mix accentuated its dreamlike quality, sounds darting between left and right channels in a way that owes more to the studio experimentation of progressive rock than to the direct attack of In Rock. Ian Gillan’s vocal is sparsely applied before giving way to an extended instrumental section, with Ritchie Blackmore supplying some wild, wang-bar soloing propelled by Glover’s muscular bass and Paice’s immense drumming. Little surprise that in concert it quickly evolved into a platform for Paice’s celebrated drum solo, a feature of the band’s live show for many years.

The exploratory spirit continues through the album’s second side with Fools, which stretches beyond eight minutes. Beginning with a long, quietly haunting refrain, it blasts into a monster Sabbath-style riff before dissolving into something strange and atmospheric. Blackmore coaxes eerie, violin-like sounds from his guitar, Lord responds with waves of Hammond organ, and the music drifts into an unsettling soundscape. Gillan’s nihilistic lyric (“I am of the dead… You don’t know the pain I feel”) takes the whole piece well over the top, producing an air of apocalyptic melodrama.

By contrast, No One Came closes the second side on a more exuberant note. Built around one of Glover’s most infectious bass lines and driven by Lord’s exuberant organ-playing, its free-associative lyric suggests a band still willing to experiment without taking itself too seriously, an appropriate conclusion to an album that consistently chooses curiosity over caution.

Other songs which pull the album in a more traditional direction still incorporate a subtle twist in the tale. No No No combines a woozy, almost narcotic slide guitar with one of Gillan’s most contrary lyrics – a string of questions (“Do we love each other?” “Is it getting better?”), all answered with an emphatic “No. No. No.”

Demon’s Eye is built around a deceptively simple blues-based riff, with a groove that showcases Glover’s agile bass lines. Lord sets off on an exuberant Hammond solo, and when it’s his turn Blackmore responds with a concise flurry of quicksilver blues licks, peppered towards the end with his signature whammy-bar flourishes. American audiences never heard this track on the original album, from which it was omitted to make room for the UK hit single Strange Kind Of Woman, creating two different versions of Fireball on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The biggest surprise, musically, was Anyone’s Daughter, recorded during the very first sessions for the album. A light-hearted country shuffle complete with honky-tonk piano and a laddish lyric – “I won’t get no more eggs and water/Now I’ve laid the farmer’s daughter” – it divided opinion at the time and still does.

Lord dismissed the criticism with characteristic good humour. “It’s something different,” he said. “Why not?” Given the intensity of the rest of the material, the song indicates a band confident enough to puncture its own seriousness.

Released several weeks before Fireball and included on all subsequent CD and other reissues of the album, Strange Kind Of Woman hit No. 8 in the UK and became one of Deep Purple’s defining hit singles. It demonstrated the band’s ability to produce commercial records without diluting their musical ambitions. The song’s working title was Prostitute and Gillan’s lyric, said to be about a woman that he knew at the time, has not held up so well: “Her name was Nancy/Her face was nothing fancy…”

Critical opinion of the album was divided at the time. Melody Maker praised Fireball for possessing “all the consistency which was lacking in the brash rawness of In Rock, making for a much more satisfying album as a whole.” Disc enthused that the title track arrived in “blistering fashion… packing more into three minutes than most albums manage in 40.” The Rolling Stone reviewer, however, complained about passages of “aimless, extended studio jamming”, suggesting that In Rock had struck with greater force.

The band had mixed feelings about the album. “The impetus is never as strong as it is when you’re starving,” Paice told NME in January 1973. “When you’ve got nothing, you work your balls off. Around the time of Fireball we got a little too comfortable. Everybody had got to the stage where they had nice cars and houses. There wasn’t so much impetus to work and it showed on the album.”

Speaking in June 1973, Blackmore was regally dismissive of the way Fireball had been made. “It was a bit of a disaster,” he said. “It was thrown together in the studio. Managerial pressure – we had no time… ‘You’ve got to play here, here, there, then you’ve got to make an LP.’ I told them, ‘If you want an LP, you’ve got to give us time.’ But they wouldn’t. I just threw ideas to the group that I thought up on the spur of the moment.”

Gillan came to a different conclusion, later describing Fireball as his favourite Deep Purple album of that period because it opened up “tremendous possibilities of expression”, allowing Deep Purple to bring “the funk, the blues, the soul, the jazz and some of the psychedelic thing from our early days” into their hard rock framework.

Lord agreed. “The fact that it wanders slightly doesn’t worry me at all,” he said. “I love Fireball. I think it does good things. I think it goes to places that the band wasn’t expected to go to.”

History has largely vindicated the positive perspective. Fireball confirmed that the success of In Rock was no fleeting breakthrough and established Deep Purple alongside Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath as part of the triumvirate of British hard rock bands of the early 1970s. Fireball continues to cast a long shadow as a stepping stone in the development of the band. As Jon Lord later observed: “You couldn’t have Machine Head without Fireball.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents: Deep Purple – buy it here