Prog Metal Underground

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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·21h

They waited twenty years.

Danny Marino told Season of Mist they already wanted this in the early 2000s. He met Matt McGachy. They were going to make a record. Then two decades happened.


Meridian Veil signed November 3. Montreal. Season of Mist. Debut is Forgotten Sun, 2027. Marino from The Agonist on guitar. McGachy from Cryptopsy on vocals. Dylan Gowan from Seven Spires on drums. Raphael Weinroth-Browne, the cellist who tours with Leprous, on cello. First clip is a trailer for The Watcher. Thirty-two seconds. That is all they handed over.


Marino: even when it gets heavy, a deep longing runs through the cautionary tale at its core. McGachy went home from the first sessions excited. Singing in this band is freeing. He is happy to show that side of himself. The Cryptopsy singer did not need another technical death record. He needed a room where he could actually sing.


Gowan called it progressive metal with a very dark atmosphere. Weinroth-Browne heard the demos and said 2000s death metal and prog metal, modern approach. The cello is not garnish. Four résumés on a press sheet do not get you a Season of Mist deal. A cautionary tale with a cellist might.


Twenty years is a long time to sit on a longing. They finally put it on a label.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·1d

They play it at home.

Ola Strandberg told Guitar World the sentence he keeps hearing. Players love the Strandberg at home. Then they walk on stage with someone else's signature.


That is the story at Guitar Summit 2026. The man who made headless normal in this scene is putting a headstock back on one because the look still reads as prog metal, and a lot of people will not take that into a room.


Boden Essential finally got the Arc Tilt. Straight 25.5-inch scale. Meranti body, roasted maple EndurNeck, rosewood, 24 stainless frets, Strandberg humbuckers, five-way. About five pounds. Whale Blue is the color of the first guitar Ola ever finished. Dune is the beige one. Hardtail dropped back to $999. Trem is $1,099. The Arc Tilt pivots in two dimensions so the treble strings move more than the bass. Heavy-handed players said the bridge stopped wobbling under their palm. That was not the brief. That is just what happened.


Plini's N2 sat on the same table. Boden Plini Edition N2.6T. Chambered swamp ash, maple top, titanium-reinforced roasted maple, Ebonol, 25 to 25.5-inch multiscale, Fishman Fluence Open Core Classic Plini pickups, Arc Tilt. $2,699. He told them the first prototype became his favourite guitar in seconds. Official clip is him on that guitar, not a spec overlay.


Then Ola walked over to a Strandberg with a headstock. UME. Modular. Mystery player from NAMM. He called this the last barrier a year ago. This year: the concept will probably stay more metal, but a headstock changes whether you can look in the mirror. Even guitarists who already have signatures with other brands keep the Strandberg in the house and take the conventional one to the gig.


Hardware was never the problem. The room still decides what you are allowed to look like.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·2d

Every other record ran over an hour.

Emmanuel Jessua told Pelagic the story is almost a detail. He met a scientist at an observatory on La Réunion who was studying trame noire. Urban architecture that keeps the night dark so nocturnal species can actually live in it. A change in light. A pulse. A leaf. That is what tells you something about the character.


Trame Noire lands tomorrow on Pelagic. Thirty-nine minutes. Five tracks. Seventh album. Follow-up to A Distant (Dark) Source and Sheol, both of which ran like films you could not pause. This one is one night, one voice, one trauma. They pulled the samples back because the lyrics are one person. Warmer, looser, more 70s psych than tech-metal. Jessua: every album should tell its story differently. He never wants Hypno5e to become predictable.


First record written start to finish as this four-piece. Jonathan Maurois on guitar. Charles Villanueva on bass. Pierre Rettien on drums. Jessua still writing, still directing the videos, still handing the cover to his father Thierry as a raw sketch.


Lost Fires is 8:42. Falmer is 9:09. The title track is almost ten. They did not get shorter by writing singles. They got shorter by cutting the fat off a movie.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·3d

They led with the nine-minute song.

Dreamer told the press the first single had to show every side of the record. Epic melodic sections, huge emotional atmosphere, ripping fast technical moments, a subdued clean break. Structured and linear. Evolves, morphs, always references back to itself. Extreme and progressive without dropping either.


Then they sent Regress. Nine minutes and thirty-one seconds. That is the discovery. Not a three-minute trailer for a playlist.


Autogenesis lands December 11 on Beyond the Top. Nine tracks. First official release after Christopher Beattie's instrumental demos in 2020 and 2021. Beattie writes guitars and keys. He joined The Zenith Passage in 2022, toured, wrote on Datalysium, and kept this one in the folder. Kyle Chapman (Blighted Eye, Aethereus) sings. Josef Hossain-Kay on drums. Zachary Rivizzigno second guitar. Ricky Alvarado-Cabrera on bass.


Heavy Blog premiered it October 23. Eden Kupermintz had already heard the rest of the album. Same verdict: bright, slightly sweet, still crushingly heavy. Los Angeles extreme prog that playlists will skip because the introduction is nine minutes. Start there anyway.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·4d

They hired him for the quiet parts.

Kelly Schilling told SOURCE the mix had one job. Dreadnought are extreme and delicate in the same song. Both have to be in the production. Not a louder version of one of them.


Wars of Spirit // Wards of Light landed September 11 on Vesperian. Forty minutes. Six tracks. Colorado progressive metal, sixth album, first with Ryan Sims on guitar and vocals. Follow-up to The Endless from 2022.


They produced it themselves. Andy Patterson recorded two weeks in Salt Lake City. Kelly tracked the synths at home. They rebuilt a section of The Twilight Protectorate right before the drums went down. Julius Mauranen was the first-choice mixer, specifically for what he did with Oranssi Pazuzu. Jaakko Viitalähde mastered it.


Schilling wanted a 40-minute soundscape with soundtrack nuance and natural movement. Most metal mixes still chase the loudness war. This one refused. Tiamat's Gate is the proof. Nine minutes. Blastbeats and ringing piano in the same room, and the piano is still there when the kit detonates.


That is the production story. They hired a psychedelic-metal mixer so the quiet parts would survive.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·5d

The tone was still in his fingers.

Thomas Miller told Prog Rock Journal the same thing he has been telling bass players for thirty years. Different basses. Different amps. Almost every Symphony X record. It still sounded like him. A lot of the tone is from his fingers.


That is the spotlight. The guy who used to write the counter-melody under Romeo, left in 1999, then spent a quarter century writing anyway.


Thomas Miller's Lazarus Effect landed October 30 on Sensory. Forty-nine minutes. He wrote the riffs, the keys, the lyrics, the vocal melodies. Romeo played guitar. Michael Pinnella took two keyboard solos, Closer To The Sun and the five-part closer Sailing To Utopia. Howard "Hollywood How" Portney sings. Eric Rachel mixed it, same desk as the first six Symphony X records. Miller named the project after himself on purpose. Dean Wolfe got the line: it is a project, not a band, so nobody thinks Romeo quit.


When Darkness Falls took about an hour. Harmonic minor. Straight at your face. Fear No Evil is the one he says is the album in a nutshell. Closer To The Sun is the other idea. Myth, Middle Eastern tonalities, acoustic guitar and violin first, then the bass and guitar rhythms. He started because of Gene Simmons. Then Geddy. Then Billy Sheehan opened the tapping door. Odd meter from Rush, UK, Kansas, Yes. First jam with Romeo in 1986: Miller sounded like Sheehan, Romeo sounded like Yngwie. By 1994 they already knew.


Twenty-five years later the bass still sounds like his hands.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·6d

They weren't replacing anybody yet.

Ross Jennings spent October telling people Haken is still two men down on purpose. Charlie Griffiths and Conner Green left in January. Prog’s Paul Travers got the line late in the month: monumental fixtures, a really hard time, change is hard, the band is like any marriage. They are not hiring a fifth and a sixth. They went into Vada Studios as four.


in a fever dream is the EP that came out of that. Digital July 17. CD and vinyl September 18 on Inside Out. Twenty-six minutes. Five tracks, all lower case: in a fever dream, delirium, eclipsed by you, bleeding sky, lotus. First new music since Fauna in 2023. First outside producer they have ever used, George Lever, who also mixed it. Bryan Beller on the title track and lotus. Adam Getgood on delirium and bleeding sky. Richard Henshall is the only guitar now. Ray Hearne ran three kits through every song.


Jennings told Rockfreaks ahead of VEGA that they grew out of proving themselves musically. Immediacy as a reaction to the old complexity. The whole EP is about transformation. Henshall told Prog Report they used to jam in the garden studio. This time they sat in Vada for a week and cut the arrangements in the room. The title track and lotus started as one song. They split it so the EP would loop.


That is the interview. Not a new guitarist. A four-piece that refused to pretend it was still six.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 31

They built the pickups for the amp that isn't there.

PRS launched the Tekton family October 20. Four USA bolt-ons for technical modern players: hardtail, T with the two-point trem, Floyd on an all-alder body, and the SVN seven-string.


The interesting part is not the mango tops. It is the Stylus pickups. Alnico 5, coil-split, deliberately flatter output so a modeler has room to work. Most metal humbuckers shove their own color in front of the amp. These assume the amp is software.


First stainless steel frets PRS has ever put in production. First 16-inch radius. Thinnest body and neck they have made. Birds gone. Offset dots and Luminlay instead. Six-strings are 25.5-inch, $2,899. The SVN is 26.5-inch, first USA production seven from the company, $2,999.


Jim Cullen called it planting a flag for a whole new family. Maryland spent decades selling carved tops to people who already owned a Custom 24. This one is for the player who never wanted the birds.


Guitar World (Tekton T & SVN):

Guitarist full demo:

Thomann first look:

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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 30

They shipped it a whole octave down.

Sleep Token’s first signatures landed August 26 from Jackson and Charvel. IV did not get the 8-string people expected.


The Jackson Pro Plus Series Signature Sleep Token IV Monarkh SC is a 30-inch six-string that leaves the factory a whole octave below standard. Bound mahogany with a quilt maple veneer, three-piece caramelized maple set neck, pale moon ebony, 22 stainless frets, direct-mount Fishman Fluence Open Core Classic humbuckers, EverTune 6 with custom saddles. MSRP $2,199.99. IV picked the spec himself. The production guitar comes from the Custom Shop 30-inch single-cut he has been running on stage, not from the 8-string he also tours with. Guitar World put it next to a Fender Bass VI for a reason. That low E is a .084. A regular bridge would not survive it. The EverTune is how you keep a whole-octave-down guitar honest night after night.


III got the Charvel Sleep Token III Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Bass V. Five-string, 34.4 to 35.5-inch multi-scale, poplar body, caramelized maple neck, custom red Fishman Fluence soapbars with a 2-band EQ, question mark inlay across the 11th to 13th frets, reverse Strat headstock. $1,599.99.


To sell the pair they filmed an instrumental Vore, full length of the Take Me Back To Eden cut, both of them, no Vessel, no spec overlays. If you wanted the riff without the ritual, that is the clip.


Vore (instrumental, Jackson/Charvel):

Guitar World first look:

Vore (original):

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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 29

They talked for two years

TesseracT RADAR is still the concert film Kscope is selling as the new one. Filmed at Radar Festival 2024, Victoria Warehouse, Manchester. Out December 5, 2025. Eighty-five minutes. Dark Fable, Richard Oakes directing. Soundtrack is RADAR O.S.T., Choir Noir on the credits, vinyl cut half-speed at Abbey Road.


The band's own line is the whole argument. The ninety minutes on stage were preceded by two full years of talks. Joe at Radar and Mos. Venue changes, schedule changes, album touring. None of it killed the night once it started moving. Kat Marsh's choir had already shaped the vocals on War of Being. They did not hire a choir for the camera. They brought the same voices into a warehouse.


Daniel Tompkins. Acle Kahney. Amos Williams. James Monteith. Jay Postones. Twelve songs. Natural Disaster opens at eight minutes. Concealing Fate Part One: Acceptance is the old suite, eight minutes of it. Sacrifice is ten. War of Being closes at twelve. Legion has a one-shot on the Blu-ray. Dolby Atmos if you have the disc. Classic Rock called it a bubble, which is correct. Festival headline slots usually sound like a PA fighting a tent. This one sounds like they built a room inside the room.


A live album is often a souvenir of a tour that already happened. This one is a festival they spent two years arguing into existence, then they mastered the tape like a score.


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