Progressive-Metal on vo.rs

Leprous: Norwegian Prog's Rising Force

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment at every Leprous show where the whole band drops to almost nothing — a single held note, a heartbeat of bass, the drummer barely brushing a cymbal — and Einar Solberg’s voice climbs up alone into a register most singers cannot reach without cracking, and then the entire arrangement crashes back in at once. That contrast, engineered obsessively and executed with terrifying precision, is the whole reason Leprous have become one of the most talked-about progressive acts in Europe. They are a band built on the space between quiet and loud.

Enslaved: Black Metal That Kept Growing Up

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Opeth: Mikael Åkerfeldt's Long Goodbye to Growling

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In 2011 one of the best death metal bands in the world put out an album with no death metal on it, and split its own audience clean down the middle. That album was Heritage, the band was Opeth, and the man who did it on purpose was Mikael Åkerfeldt, following his own taste off a cliff he had been walking towards for years.

Opeth formed in Stockholm in 1989, and Åkerfeldt took the wheel early, becoming the songwriter, guitarist, lead vocalist and guiding intelligence of the whole project. For roughly two decades they were the most sophisticated death metal band going — a group that treated brutality and beauty as equal partners, and swung between them inside a single ten-minute song. That combination is the thing to understand about Opeth, because it explains both the greatness and the eventual divorce with half their fans.

Meshuggah: The Swedish Machine That Bent Metal's Rhythm

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the far north of Sweden, in a university town where the winter dark lasts most of the day, four men spent the nineties working out how to make a metal riff feel like the floor was falling away beneath you. They called the band Meshuggah, and they ended up rewiring how a whole generation of heavy bands thinks about rhythm.

Meshuggah come from Umeå, a cold city on the Gulf of Bothnia, and they formed in 1987. That geography matters more than you would expect. Umeå is a long way from the melodic west-coast scene that made Swedish metal famous, and Meshuggah never sounded remotely like their compatriots. Where the Gothenburg sound built melody on top of aggression, Meshuggah went the opposite way entirely and stripped melody almost out of the equation, leaving rhythm, texture and a kind of mechanical menace. They are the great outliers of Swedish metal, and also its most influential export you have possibly never heard on the radio.

Tool at Royal Arena: Patience, Geometry, and 10,000 Held Breaths

Sat, 07 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000