Prog Metal Underground

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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·15h

They handed the last record to FOH

SPHERES Dyson landed on Art Gates October 16. French cinematic prog. Third record. Trilogy closer after Iono and Helios. Named for the megastructure you wrap around a star. Jonathan Lino produced it and tracked it at JL Studio in Montreuil. Vocals, guitar, keys. Marc-Antoine Walczak on the other guitar and keys. Clemence Santé bass. Jesses Haddad drums. Then they sent the mix to Chris Edrich. His day job is the desk at Devin Townsend, TesseracT, and Leprous. Pierrick Noel mastered. Julien Grelet did the cover, same as the first two. Seven tracks.


Lino on the shift: heavier, darker, and he still has not figured out humanity, which is why he wrote it. Underworld opens on Santé's bass. Kemper is the one that gets heavier. Of course they named a song that. Edrich has said that on the stages he mixes, guitars are already a modeler into the console, so drums and voice are the only real air in the room. That is the mix they hired. We Are Not Alone looks at the sky and does not answer. Drive Me To The Dawn is the night-terror one, Med Hvd Prod video, who is steering when the demon rides shotgun. I Like To Comment keeps the breaks moving. Shadows of Despair is the clean climb Rolling Stone France flagged on street date. Virtual Prison closes it, eight minutes, David Lino lyric video. A person wakes up inside a fake world because a hand is real.


Headbanging Moose, four days later, heard Santé and Haddad making Kemper shake and Virtual Prison as the layered closer. Rock and Blog heard collapse, grief, and inner noise as the human side of the megastructure, not a sci-fi plot dump. Rolling Stone France called it precise in the writing, organic in the playing.


Lino built the geometry in Montreuil. Then they gave the last pass to someone who mixes rooms for a living. The Dyson Tour is already on the board for Spain, France, and the UK in 2027. That is the point. The record should survive a PA.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·1d

They framed the shouting with choirs

Prog metal still loves a novel. One hero, one plot, a tracklist that pretends it is a table of contents. Messier 16's third album does not do that job. Shouts from the Cliffs of Heterodoxy landed October 23 on Time To Kill. Twelve songs, about sixty-five minutes, Oslo. Jonas Ulrik Eide writes and plays guitar. Sondre M. Svalastog sings. Aleksander Ilievski plays the other guitar, produced it, and mixed it. Nicoló Cavallaro on bass. Jonathan Hamre on drums. Camille Giraudeau mastered. Killjoydesign did the cover.


The record is portrait work. A nostalgia that grieves something that never happened. A city dweller who cannot tell what year it is. A cynic who only tears down. An orator who never finds the speech. That last one is Mollusk Herald, three minutes fifty-five, the official video Time To Kill posted with Svalastog in front of old film scraps. Time-Swayed Cities is the lyric video. Dead Rhetoric, a week before street date, heard Blank Absurdist Form as black metal on steroids and Gloom-Chaser as melody and filth trying to bury each other for almost nine minutes.


Then the three-part Perennial Shift eats more than twenty minutes in the middle. Moss, evergreen, plietesial. Plietesial is the plant that blooms once and dies. Merg & Been, writing the day after release, liked the room that suite gives the band and warned that constant left turns can cost cohesion. That is the risk of putting the record out this way. You do not get a plot to hold. You get twelve studies, and the album is the frame.


Choirs open it (Nostalgia Theft Reminiscence, 2:47) and close it (Trauma Gift Repression, 6:32). Everything between them is the shouting. Iota was 2021. Death Poems was 2023. This is the one that asks you to stand on the cliff and decide if the noise is a welcome or a warning.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·2d

They hired him to leave the dirt in

Entheos Empty On The Inside landed on Metal Blade yesterday. Chaney Crabb on voice. Navene Koperweis on drums, guitar, synth. Scott Carstairs and Michael Stancel on guitar. Evan Brewer on bass. Ten tracks, a little under forty minutes. Mark Lewis produced and mixed it. Justin Sturtz mastered it at Sterling Sound.


Lewis is a death metal guy. Black Dahlia Murder, Fallujah, Whitechapel. You call him when the kit needs to punch. They called him to keep the performances. The band said it without hedging: authentic playing over hyper-polished modern production. Dead Rhetoric heard it as gritty, organic, filthier than anything they have cut.


Golden Crown is the 90s rock song they have been rewriting since 2020. Creepy synths, a chorus that actually opens, then a breakdown that does not tidy itself. Malcolm Pugh shot the video. Undone puts the industrial floor first. Tomblight has Michael Lessard. Never Let Me Go is the quiet one. The rest still hits. It just does not sound like it went through a template.


Crabb on the cover: they built the scene and photographed it. Rachel Craig. No Photoshop grief. Same argument as the mix. If the take is the point, you do not paint over it.


The Nashville release show was last night at the '58. Plenty of 2026 metal gets louder by getting tighter. This one left the take in.








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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·3d

Grant The Sun's Biomes writes djent and post-metal as one climate

The labels still pretend these are two neighborhoods. Grant The Sun's Biomes does not. Out October 16 on Mas-Kina Recordings, the Oslo trio wrote a record about forest and desert, then used the two heaviest dialects in progressive metal as the weather.


Håvard Sveberg on drums. Martin Rygge, who also plays in Beaten To Death, on guitar and screams. Markus Lillehaug Johnsen on guitar, bass, and the clean voice. Voyage in 2023 was the water record, mostly instrumental. This one is land. William Hay's cover splits a desert into a rainforest. The songs do the same thing without a scene change.


Eleven tracks, a little over forty-eight minutes. The band produced it. Daniel Bergstrand mixed it. Lawrence Mackrory mastered it. Tedium is the barren stretch. Decibel premiered it September 3. The band said it is about an endless desert that never changes, then admitted they had no idea how to record the drums until an early Pantera streak showed up and made the rest of the song sit still. Cinder closes it. Heavy Blog ran that one in July. Gold is the open, progressive side. A Chemical Floor does not let up. The Taos Hum sits in the middle of the map. Jaguar has a slide line you will catch yourself humming.


The shift worth caring about is the vocals. Two records of almost no singing, then Rygge's shouts cutting the mix like extra percussion and Johnsen's cleans living inside the atmosphere instead of parked on top of it. Four tracks stay instrumental. The other seven treat voice as climate.


This is what the fusion sounds like when a band stops arguing about lanes and writes both environments into the same hour.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·4d

They tracked it in the dark

Yevhenii Zhytniuk writes Ignea from the keys. He produced Monumental and recorded it with Dmytro Herasymov. Winter 2025 into 2026, Kyiv, ice, long blackouts. Nine tracks. Helle Bohdanova wrote the words. Dmytro Vinnichenko on guitar, Oleksandr Kamyshyn on bass, Dmitry Kim on drums. Jacob Hansen mixed and mastered it at Hansen Studios. Napalm, tomorrow.


Metal Insider had the review yesterday: candlelight writing, tracking between air raids. Darkness puts a live choir on blast beats. They shot that video the morning after a missile night, then again with sirens and drones overhead. Dreams of Lands Unseen is the theremin one. The cosmonaut suits came from Dovzhenko, the costume house flattened in the same strike. Prefab is the industrial one, Andy LaPlegua from Combichrist. Britta Görtz from Hiraes on Harmony Manufactured.


June 14 into 15, that strike hit the film studio and Ignea's HQ. Windows gone. Costume workshop gone, about a hundred thousand pieces with it. The album was already finished. The room that made it was not.


Prog production talk this week is still plugin chains. This one is a keyboardist keeping a session alive when the grid dies, then sending the stems to Denmark.







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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·5d

Two songs when they plugged in

Iver Sandøy had April. Enslaved booked the studio and the mix first. Day one, two tracks written. Mið is eight songs, forty-two minutes, out October 30. Old Norse for the centre. He drums and produces.


Ivar wanted Bonham grooves on Solar Will because the sun is a parent that can also kill you. Less layering than Heimdal. Fewer overdubs. Johan Sara Jr on I Am Ice. Kevin Kicking Woman on Spirit Helper. The rest is the five of them, working under a knife.


Sick Drummer had him on October 7. He told Write Said Paul they found the centre because they had to. KillerTube got the day-one number on the 14th: two songs when they plugged in.


Plenty of prog records get extra months so the drums can get clever. This one got a calendar.





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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·6d

It never had a record

Holy Land came out in 1996. São Paulo, colonial Brazil as the plot, Brazilian percussion sitting next to European twin leads. André Matos, Kiko Loureiro, Rafael Bittencourt, Ricardo Confessori, Luis Mariutti. Sascha Paeth and Charlie Bauerfeind produced it. Carolina IV runs ten minutes thirty-three. That is the whole argument in one track.


It never had a record. CD, cassette, then the stream. Thirty years of people asking. Voice Music puts the first vinyl out October 30: double LP, remastered, gatefold, unreleased photos, 30 x 60 cm insert, blue or red. Black Rock Store in Brazil ships from October 29. Outside Brazil and Japan, Metal Department handles the rest. Napalm's black 140g gatefold, printed colour innersleeves, 60 x 40 cm foldout poster, same day. The white is 300 copies and already gone on Napalm. Rock Kommander has 300 random marble.


The album is the same. The territories are not. Brazilian shops get Voice Music colors. Everyone else fights Napalm, Metal Department, and a marble lottery.


Plenty of anniversary pressings reprint a catalog that already had wax. This one waited thirty years, then split the planet in half to sell it.





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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 19

He said yes to one song

Ryan Koepke started Cepheidae Variable in Kelowna as a one-man instrumental. Primordial Reverie landed November 7, 2025: nine tracks, recurring motifs, no singer. Last year he told Crannk he might just learn vocals himself. He was not looking around town. There is no prog scene to look in.


Chad Bernatchez from VOIDCHASER, based in Stockholm, heard the record and asked to try a song. Koepke only listens to albums as albums, so he said yes with the rest already in his head. "I better make him enjoy this process," he told Crannk on October 9, "because if we do one song, I'm going to want to do the whole thing."


That one song became Primordial Reverie Ascendant, due January 8, 2027. Same nine titles. A space adventurer now has a voice, clean and harsh. The Waiting Storm is the short one, three minutes thirteen, the most straightforward riff on the record, about sitting still until you cannot. Metalheads Forever posted the new sit-down today. The bios still say duo. He already told Crannk they are a four-piece, plus a bassist for the next album he will not name.


Plenty of instrumental records pick up a singer later. Fewer of them write the rooms first, then invite someone in to live there.






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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 18

They kept the dead name

Search supergroup. The feed is TEMIC. Poland already had a band.


Blindead stopped in 2019. Six albums of sludge and post-metal out of the Tri-City. They came back as Blindead 23. Same singer, Patryk Zwoliński. Then they stacked the CVs. Mateusz "Havoc" Śmierzchalski, ex-Behemoth, on guitars, synths, piano. Roger Öjersson, ex-Katatonia, on the other guitar and keys. Paweł "Pavulon" Jaroszewicz, VLTIMAS, ex-Vader, ex-Decapitated, on the kit.


Debut is Deuterium. Peaceville, May 22. Seven tracks, 54 minutes. Recorded spring 2023 at Studio Gröndahl in Stockholm with David Castillo. Mixed by Kuba Mańkowski. They sat on the tape for three years. Immersion II is 10:51. Worst Laid Plans is 10:45. Closer You Are the Universe.


The first promoter collapsed. Astral Entertainment saved five rooms. Gdynia last night. Bydgoszcz tonight. Wrocław Thursday, Łódź Friday, Warsaw Saturday.


Prog metal supergroup news this week is still another new name on a press sheet. This one exists because they put four CVs on a dead band and had to rescue the tour so the rooms could hear it.



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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·Oct 17

Eight mixes of the same song

Search production techniques. The feed will sell you Glenn Fricker's 2021 course, Joey Sturgis on a gate, and another URM walkthrough. Huddersfield already ran the experiment.


Jan-Peter Herbst and Mark Mynett at the University of Huddersfield. Heaviness in Metal Music Production, Volume II. Print 2026. The stems landed on Zenodo June 9. One song, In Solitude, five minutes, written for the test. Blast beats, a technical section, a half-time breakdown, atmospheric passages. Eight people mixed the same multitrack: Jens Bogren, Mike Exeter, Adam "Nolly" Getgood, Josh Middleton, Fredrik Nordström, Buster Odeholm, Dave Otero, Andrew Scheps. The research team did a ninth. It is not a shoot-out.


Bogren: heaviness is musical expression. Sound only enhances it. He almost never edits drums to the grid. Odeholm: production is how you write. Sonic weight, slow tempo, rhythmic impact. A fist in your ear. He built a phase-interaction mixer so the low end of every instrument lines up. Exeter got competitive results with almost nothing on the chain.


Chapter 12 of the application guide is the part that belongs here. Traditional metal is naturalistic. Djent is hyperreal. Progressive metal is the one line that says context-dependent. Vary the approach by section and intensity. A verse that wants room sound and a riff that wants grid lock live on the same tape.


They loudness-matched the masters so louder does not win. The comparison player is on himmp.net. Sit on one bar and jump mixers.


Prog metal production news still means one plugin chain and one course. This one exists because eight people mixed the same tape and heaviness still was not one method.