Since we just covered the Periphery tour, worth circling back to something drummer Matt Halpern said in a recent interview that explains a lot about how that band actually operates — and it's a genuinely useful idea for anyone serious about getting better at their instrument.

The Method: Write Beyond Your Current Ability

Halpern's description of Periphery's songwriting process is refreshingly honest: "We write these parts, you can't really perform them from start to finish. Then it's like, 'Oh st, now I've got to go learn this.' Those are the things that make you better."

That's a genuinely different approach from how most bands write. The conventional wisdom is you write within what the players can execute, then push the arrangement gradually as everyone's chops develop. Periphery apparently does the opposite deliberately — the writing process outruns the performance capability on purpose, and closing that gap becomes the actual practice regimen.

This tracks with everything we know about why Periphery's material sounds the way it does. The parts aren't just complex for complexity's sake — they're complex because the band has built a songwriting culture where "can we actually play this yet" is a question that gets asked after the part exists, not before.

The Songwriting Process Itself Is Democratic

Halpern also described Periphery's writing as genuinely open — any idea gets considered "if it serves the song," regardless of who brought it or what instrument it started on. For a band this technically dense, that's notable. It would be easy for a band with players this skilled to fall into "everyone writes their own parts and we stitch it together" — Periphery apparently doesn't work that way. The song's needs outrank individual instrumental ownership.

The Career Advice Matters As Much As the Technique Talk

The part of the interview worth sitting with longer than the drumming talk: Halpern's thoughts on sustainability as a modern working musician. His advice to younger players — "think about their passions and their talents and the things they like, and see if there are connections that they can draw to help sustain this career" — isn't generic career coaching. It's coming from someone in one of the genre's most commercially successful bands who still clearly thinks about the instability of making a living as a musician, even at that level.

He specifically named teaching, content creation, and graphic design as the kind of adjacent skills worth developing. That's a realistic read of 2026's music economy: even drummers in bands playing 1,500-3,000 cap rooms on eighteen-date tours need income streams that don't depend entirely on touring and streaming royalties.

Halpern's Actual Advice to Younger Drummers

The closing note is worth repeating verbatim because it cuts against the "specialize early" instinct a lot of technical drummers have: "Don't be afraid to immerse yourself in different styles of music. There's no rush. Take your time, enjoy music, learn different styles. That will help you in whatever style you eventually end up playing."

Coming from someone whose entire reputation is built on technical density in one specific lane, that's a meaningfully different message than "grind scales and rudiments until you're the fastest player in the room." Halpern is one of the more technically complete drummers in the genre precisely because his development wasn't narrow.

Worth remembering next time you're deciding whether to spend an afternoon deep in metric modulation exercises or just listening to something completely outside your usual rotation. Apparently the second one matters too.

Periphery's North American tour behind A Pale White Dot — their eighth studio album — kicks off October 22 in Philadelphia and runs through November 18 in Raleigh, hitting Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Anaheim, Dallas, Atlanta, and a bunch of mid-size markets in between. Eighteen cities, one of the genre's most durable headliners eight albums deep into a career that started as a MySpace demo band. That's the headline.

The reason to actually buy the ticket is direct support: Ne Obliviscaris.

Why Ne Obliviscaris Specifically

If you don't already know them, here's the pitch: Australian progressive extreme metal, violin as a genuinely load-bearing lead instrument rather than a novelty, harsh/clean dual vocal trade-offs that function more like a conversation than a gimmick, and arrangements that pull from black metal, death metal, and full orchestral progressive rock without any of it feeling like a checklist. They've been doing this since the mid-2000s and have never quite gotten the audience size their songwriting deserves.

Part of that is just geography — an Australian band building a global audience the hard way, without the algorithmic tailwind some of their peers got. Part of it is that violin-led extreme metal is a genuinely hard sell to describe to someone who hasn't heard it; you have to actually put it in front of people.

This tour does exactly that. Direct support slot on an eighteen-date Periphery run means Ne Obliviscaris is playing to rooms full of exactly the audience most likely to actually get what they're doing — people who already have the patience for unconventional arrangements and technical density. That's a much better bet than trying to win over a generic metal crowd.

The Full Bill Is Worth Knowing

Rounding out the tour: Greyhaven (alternative metalcore, more aggressive and riff-forward, a solid palate cleanser between the two more progressive-leaning acts) and Ando San, described as "prog-hop" — genuinely unusual booking that signals Periphery is still willing to put weird openers in front of their audience rather than defaulting to the safest possible support slate.

Full Dates

10/22 Philadelphia · 10/23 Worcester · 10/24 Silver Spring · 10/26 Toronto · 10/27 Montreal · 10/29 McKees Rocks · 10/30 Chicago · 10/31 Minneapolis · 11/02 Denver · 11/03 Salt Lake City · 11/05 Portland · 11/06 Seattle · 11/08 Sacramento · 11/10 Anaheim · 11/11 Phoenix · 11/13 San Antonio · 11/14 Dallas · 11/16 St. Petersburg · 11/17 Atlanta · 11/18 Raleigh

The Bigger Point

Headliner tours are how bands like Ne Obliviscaris actually break through — not through algorithmic discovery, not through a viral moment, but through eighteen nights of playing in front of rooms that showed up already primed to listen carefully. If you're going for Periphery, show up early. That's not a courtesy suggestion, that's the actual reason to buy the ticket in the first place.

There's a specific trap that talented bass players fall into when they go solo: the record becomes a technique showcase. Endless slap runs, tapping cascades, everything mixed forward because it's their album and dammit, people should hear the bass. It usually makes for an exhausting listen.

Fernando Molinari's new record Numen avoids that trap completely, and his explanation of why is worth hearing directly.

What Numen Actually Is

Five tracks, fully instrumental, fusing metal, jazz, fusion, and flamenco into a Roman-mythology concept record — "Numen" is Latin for a divine presence or will, which tracks with how Molinari talks about the album's purpose. He composed, arranged, and produced the whole thing, then brought in serious firepower to execute it: Marco Minnemann, Andre Nieri, Chris Clark, and Daniel Felix among the contributing musicians.

The playing is genuinely absurd in places — odd-time syncopations stacked against fretless melodic lines doubling face-melting themes — but none of it reads as showing off, and that's deliberate.

"I Don't Compose With an Instrument in Hand"

Here's the detail that matters most: Molinari doesn't write on bass. He records vocal ideas into his phone and transcribes them later on a computer, only picking up an instrument once a song's structure already exists. His reasoning, in his own words: "I only pick up an instrument once the song is finished, so I don't get boxed in by technique. My priority is writing something that genuinely excites me first."

That's the whole difference between a bass showcase record and an actual composition. If you write from the instrument, you write toward what your hands already know how to do — the ideas get shaped by technical comfort before they get shaped by what the music actually needs. Writing vocally first and transcribing later removes that ceiling entirely.

His own framing: "Even though I'm a bass player, I see myself as a composer first. I want the tracks to stand as full band compositions, not just bass features."

The Emotional Core Underneath the Technicality

Ask why a record this technically dense doesn't feel cold, and Molinari's answer is disarmingly direct: "Turning my feelings into music is my safe place — a place where I find something bigger than I can describe, that makes me feel closer to something divine, a place where I find peace, joy, and a cure for my darkest moments. Music is a NUMEN in my life!"

That context reframes the whole listen. The odd-time passages and the fretless runs aren't there to prove anything technical — they're the vocabulary he uses to work through something real, the same way Molinari's contemporaries reach for lyrics.

Why This Matters Beyond One Record

The Molinari approach is the inverse of the stereotype about instrumental solo bass records, and it's a useful model for anyone in this scene picking up extended-range or fretless instruments because the tech is exciting. Technique should follow the idea, not generate it. Write the song first — on your phone, humming into a voice memo if that's what it takes — and let the instrument catch up to what the music actually needs.

Numen is out now on Bandcamp, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Worth a serious, patient listen — not background music, but not an exercise in ego either.

We covered Prince of Failure back on release day — the Tompkins/Ortiz collaboration, the Kscope release, the neurodivergence concept. What we didn't have then was Tompkins actually explaining what that concept means to him personally. A new Louder interview fills that in, and it recontextualizes the whole record.

The Diagnosis Behind the Album

Prince of Failure started as another Tompkins solo record with Ortiz producing. It became something else after Tompkins was diagnosed with ADHD with autistic traits partway through the process. His words: "It's been a poignant moment in my life — it's made me question everything. All my insecurities, I'm starting to understand, were born from this."

Naming the album — and by extension, naming that part of himself — became the mechanism for dealing with it. "Giving Prince Of Failure a name has allowed me to almost exorcise that part of me that was always telling me that I was doing something wrong." If you've heard the record and felt like the lyrics carried more weight than typical concept-album distance allows, this is why. It's not a character study. It's closer to a diary that happens to have spacious arrangements and electronic textures wrapped around it.

This Isn't Tompkins and Ortiz's First Rodeo

Worth remembering the history here, because it explains why this collaboration works: Tompkins and Ortiz released a synthwave record together as Zeta back in 2019. They followed that with Ruins, a guitar-centric rework of Tompkins' 2019 solo album Castles, with Ortiz producing. Prince of Failure is the third act of a working relationship that's clearly built on real trust — the kind you need if you're going to make an album this exposed.

The Line About Gatekeeping Is Worth Sitting With Too

The same interview has Tompkins addressing something that's been simmering in the scene for a while: musicians accused of gatekeeping in the AI/social-media era. His response is worth quoting directly: "People say, 'Musicians are mad because they can't gatekeep any more.' I don't want to gatekeep anything. The joy is the creative process, not likes and comments."

That's a genuinely healthy way to frame the anxiety a lot of working musicians feel right now about AI tools and algorithm-driven engagement metrics eating into what used to just be making the thing. Tompkins isn't defensive about it — he's reorienting toward what actually matters to him, which tracks with an album that's fundamentally about learning to quiet the internal critic rather than perform for an audience.

Why This Matters Beyond One Record

Prog metal doesn't talk about neurodivergence and mental health as directly as this very often. The genre's usual mode is metaphor and distance — concept albums about AI, about space, about abstract identity collapse. Prince of Failure is doing something more direct: an established, respected vocalist naming his own diagnosis and building a record around processing it in real time, then talking about it plainly in interviews rather than hiding behind the concept.

That's a meaningful shift, and it's worth supporting loudly. Go back and listen to the record with this context if you haven't already — it plays differently once you know what's actually being worked through.

Nail The Mix has two sessions live right now that are worth everyone's attention if you care about how the records you love actually get built — real multitracks, real session files, straight from the people who mixed them.

Acle Kahney Opens Up "Juno"

TesseracT's Acle Kahney handles both production and mixing on every TesseracT record, and the "Juno" session (off Sonder) is a genuinely dense teaching tool. A few things worth knowing if you're trying to understand why TesseracT sounds the way it does:

• Comb-filtered delay throws are doing a lot of the atmospheric work in that record's spatial character — not just reverb, actual delay shaped to create phase-cancellation textures that read as "atmosphere" rather than "echo."

• Mid-side widening gets used deliberately, not as a mastering-stage afterthought but as a compositional tool for how the polyrhythmic guitars occupy the stereo field without stepping on each other.

• The low end — bass and floor toms specifically — carries real weight in the mix, which matters because TesseracT's polymetric guitar parts are constantly fighting for midrange space. If the low end wasn't doing structural work, the whole mix would feel thin.

• Sidechain automation, multiband compression, and subtractive EQ across the buses (not just individual tracks) — this is how you keep a mix with this much simultaneous information from collapsing into mud.

Kahney's whole approach is described as hybrid: digital precision for control, analog-style coloration to keep it from sounding sterile. That balance is basically the entire argument for why TesseracT's records sound "warm" despite being some of the most surgically produced material in the genre.

Jamie King Shows His Work on The Contortionist

The other session worth knowing about: Jamie King's mix of "Return to Earth" from Clairvoyant. Different problem, same level of craft.

The Contortionist's challenge isn't complexity fighting for space — it's density without mud. Layers of guitar, intricate bass, synths, vocal harmonies stacked on top of an already-detailed drum recording. King's drum mic setup alone tells you how seriously this was tracked: kick in and kick out mics blended for attack and boom, top and bottom snare mics for crack and sizzle, four toms delivered pre-cleaned of bleed, plus a full stereo overhead/room/distant-mono-room suite for spatial control.

The detail that stood out most: the bass on that track is finger-style, not pick — unusual for a genre that typically wants pick attack for consistency and aggression. It works because the player digs in hard enough that the intensity replaces what a pick would normally provide. Signal chain was a clean DI blended with a miked amp — full-range low end from the DI, grit and midrange character from the amp.

King's whole approach on that record is "create space, don't fix sounds" — the performances and tones were already right, so the mixing job was making sure a genuinely dense arrangement stays legible.

Why This Matters If You're Not a Producer

Even if you never touch a DAW, understanding this stuff changes how you listen. Next time "Juno" or "Return to Earth" comes on, you're not just hearing a great song — you're hearing a mid-side decision, a multiband compression choice on the drum bus, a finger-style bass part deliberately chosen over a pick.

The gap between "good prog metal song" and "prog metal song that sounds massive on serious speakers" is entirely in decisions like these. Worth remembering next time a bedroom-recorded record doesn't quite land the same way — it's not usually the performance. It's usually forty small mix decisions like the ones above, made or not made.

Day 2 of ProgPower USA XXV happens tonight in Atlanta — Fires in the Distance, Scardust, Teramaze, Elvenking doing a special "Heathenreel & The Winter Wake" set, Firewind, and Conception closing things out. Good bill. Not the story, though.

The actual story of ProgPower USA XXV: this is the last edition under founder Glenn Harveston.

Harveston started this festival in 2001 as an oddball proposition — a four-day, invite-only, 1,100-capacity progressive and power metal festival in Atlanta, at a time when nobody thought that audience was big enough to sustain something like this in North America. Twenty-five years later it's the standard-bearer. The schedule for Saturday, September 12 literally has a slot: "Glenn Says Goodbye," 4:30–4:50pm, wedged between Roy Khan's solo set and Redemption. Current Day 2 promoter Milton Mendonça takes over running the festival starting in 2027.

That's a genuinely emotional way to close a 25-year run. Worth sitting with for a second before getting into the bill itself.

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The Lineup Earns the Anniversary

This isn't a victory-lap bill coasting on nostalgia — it's stacked with genuine "how did they get this" bookings:

• Nevermore on Friday. Whatever form this takes given Warrel Dane's passing in 2017, it's going to be the most emotionally loaded set of the weekend.

• Roy Khan performing solo on Saturday — his first extended US stage presence in years, a big deal for anyone who grew up on Kamelot's Khan-era run.

• The Gathering featuring Anneke Van Giersbergen closing out Saturday alongside Voyager.

• Crimson Glory's return, Fabio Lione performing Dawn of Victory in its entirety on Day 1, and Elvenking's special Heathenreel/Winter Wake set tonight — deep-cut, legacy-respecting programming throughout.

• Full 25th edition roster: Ensiferum, Eluveitie, Conception, HammerFall, Threshold, DGM, Brainstorm, Seven Spires, Sunburst, and more across the four days.

Twelve international bands, six per headliner night — that's been Harveston's format since day one, and it hasn't changed for the anniversary. Quality over quantity, still.

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The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

Co-promoter Milton Mendonça gave an interview to The Progressive Subway addressing something that's been quietly hammering festivals like this: visa processing delays for international artists. His numbers are stark — processing times that used to run two to four months stretched to up to ten months this year, with added scrutiny on top. His quote: "we started all of our visa petitions early this year, played by the rules, and still kind of got screwed in the end. And there were a bunch of bands that were not approved, simply because our government didn't think that they were relevant enough."

For a festival whose entire identity is built on bringing European and international progressive/power metal acts to a North American audience that otherwise wouldn't see them, that's an existential problem, not a bureaucratic footnote. Worth remembering next time a European band you've been dying to see cancels their US dates without much explanation.

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What Comes Next

Mendonça inherits a festival with a real identity and a real audience — Center Stage Atlanta sells out its 1,100 capacity reliably, which is no small thing for a genre this specific. The visa situation is the actual threat to worry about long-term, not a change in leadership.

If you're in the room in Atlanta this week, you're watching the end of something and the start of something else at the same time. That doesn't happen often in this scene.