Prog Metal Underground

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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·19h

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·1d

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·2d

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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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·3d

He needed several hundred people

Devin Townsend The Moth (The War – Live From Groningen) is the standalone CD and Blu-ray on November 6. InsideOut. HevyDevy. Two nights at De Oosterpoort, March 27 and 28, 2025, with the North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra and choir under Jukka Iisakkila. The studio The Moth landed in May. This film is the premiere, before that record even existed as a product. Until now it sat inside the deluxe artbook. Now you can buy the night on its own.


Townsend's line is the whole argument. Listen to the studio album and you could think it was cobbled in Pro Tools. Watch several hundred rehearsed people make the statement in real time and the writing has to stand. He calls the live version the definitive one. He also would not watch the tape until this fall. He knew it would hit him. He wanted the fires after the show to burn down first. He was afraid parts were still being ironed out on the night, and he did not want rose-colored glasses.


That is a concert film as proof, not as souvenir.


Mike Keneally on guitar and keys. Darby Todd drums. James Leach bass. Pete Rinaldi and Joseph Stephenson guitars. Anneke van Giersbergen and Lynn Wu on voices. Steve Vai co-wrote Intermission. The moth metaphor is the one he keeps repeating: caterpillar to something else, drawn to the light until it burns, spirit left.


War Beyond Words is the new clip, October 21. Strings first, then the whole room. Lexin went up late September. Prepare For War into The Big Snit is the pile-on in the second half. Covered By Causes is the eight-minute stretch.


The Amsterdam acoustic show, about six years back, is when the head of the orchestra walked up and the idea stopped being a drawer project. Groningen was the only staging. November 6 is just when the rest of us get the tape.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·4d

They wanted ten days in Norway

Thomas Hedlund told Chaoszine the tenth Cult of Luna record was gruesome, and he did not mean the riffs. In the Shadow of Your Shadow lands November 6 on their own Red Crk. Seventy-one minutes. They wanted the version where you go to Norway for ten days, play, drink too much beer, and leave with a record. Last fall they got the opposite. Hedlund was on tour. The rest of the band could not occupy the same room for more than a couple of days. He cut the drums first. Everyone else piled on through the autumn, two people at a time.


That is the interview. Not a plugin chain. A calendar that would not sit still. He has been in this band twenty-three years and still tours with Phoenix, which is why the kit went down before the rest of the house was even in the building. Daniel Berglund recorded and co-produced. Magnus Lindberg mixed. Ted Jensen mastered. Two kits on the credits for The Rift. Hedlund and Berglund. If you have day jobs and a drummer who lives on other people's buses, that is how a tenth album actually gets finished.


The Rift is the eight-minute one they put out October 7, Dehn Sora visualizer. Johannes Persson wrote it as belonging, then exclusion, then the echo chamber making both louder. Sadness Will Reign has Joe Duplantier. One More Day has David Eugene Edwards from 16 Horsepower, about eleven minutes of getting through the day. Burial closes it at nearly twelve. The title track already has the line: hiding in the shadow of your shadow.


Hedlund's other point is the Oasis one. If you do not think the record is worth someone's time and money, do not ask for it. They still made this one in pieces. Damnation in Manchester is November 7, the night after street date. The record had to exist first.


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Mahir OberaiProfile picture@mahiro·5d

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·6d

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·Oct 24

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·Oct 23

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·Oct 22

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.