Posts Tagged ‘prog rock’

Listen: ‘Frames’ feat. Christelle Ratri by HamaSaari –

Posted: 20 December 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Artisans of a sound that is at once massive and delicate, French prog-rock collective HamaSaari return this January with their long-awaited new album, Pictures, set to be released on January 23rd via Klonosphere.

Just recently, the band have unveiled a new video for the haunting track ‘Frames’, featuring guest vocals from Christelle Ratri, offering a first glimpse into the record’s thematic heart.

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Rooted in modern progressive rock and drawing inspiration from the likes of Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree, and Karnivool, HamaSaari craft music that is rich in atmosphere, emotional depth, and cinematic movement. Born from the ashes of their former project Shuffle, the band embraced a more serene and melancholic identity, allowing their sound to unfold like a stormy ritual, dark clouds, falling rain, and slowly emerging light.

Their 2023 debut album Ineffable introduced this balance with striking clarity: delicate yet powerful compositions flowing through shifting shades of darkness and color, built on organic interplay between polyrhythmic bass and drums, reverb-soaked guitars, and a clear, expressive vocal presence.

Now, nearly three years later, Pictures picks up where that journey left off and expands it into a fully realized conceptual statement. The album explores images, paintings, and dimensions, what we choose to frame, conceal, or confront. Inspired by myths, ancient civilizations, dreams, reality, and fiction, Pictures reflects on belief systems, fears, desires, and the fundamental questions that shape the human experience.

The newly released video for ‘Frames’ (feat. Christelle Ratri) embodies this vision beautifully, pairing HamaSaari’s cinematic progression with an added layer of emotional intimacy and vulnerability.

Following the release of Pictures, HamaSaari will take the album to the stage with an extensive European tour throughout spring and summer 2026. The tour will see the band bringing their captivating, emotionally charged live show to clubs and festivals across France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, culminating in major festival appearances later in the year.

HamaSaari – Pictures EU Tour 2026 (selected dates):

• March 12 – Le Mans (FR) – Le Bar’ouf
• March 19 – Lyon (FR) – Rock ’n Eat
• March 21 – Stuttgart (DE) – Club Zentral
• March 22 – Munich (DE) – Substanz
• March 24 – Kronach (DE) – Kulturclub Kronach
• March 27 – Kleve (DE) – Radhaus
• April 10 – Perpignan (FR) – L’Anthropo
• April 11 – Zaragoza (ES) – Sala Creedence
• April 12 – Badalona (ES) – Estraperlo – Club del Ritme
• April 17 – Murcia (ES) – Sala Revólver
• April 18 – Málaga (ES) – ZZ Pub
• April 21 – Coslada (ES) – The RockLab
• April 22 – Ponferrada (ES) – Sala La Vaca
• April 24 – Tolosa (ES) – Bonberenea

Festival appearances:

• July 4 – Woodbunge Festival (DE)
• July 18 – Prog For Peart – Abingdon (UK)
• July 25 – Rhine Entertainment Festival – Xanten (DE)

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Watch: ‘The Trauma’ by AVKRVST

Posted: 14 May 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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After the announcement and pre-order start of their sophomore album Waving at the Sky and the release of their first single ‘The Malevolent’ featuring Ross Jennings from Haken, Norwegian prog rockers AVKRVST reveal their second offering – ‘The Trauma’.

Simon Bergseth, vocalist, shares about ‘The Trauma’:

“‘The Trauma’ is the heart of the story— the origin of everything. A harrowing act triggered a wound that never should have been inflicted. This is where it all begins.“

The single comes with a brand-new music video in established AVKRVST aesthetics – a continuation of the story of the lonely, bleak soul in the cabin. Watch the video here:

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Credit: Kristian Rangnes

Watch: ‘Blind’ by Djiin

Posted: 23 April 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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French psychedelic/prog-rock collective Djiin will have recently revealed a music video for a brand song of their forthcoming fourth full-length album Mirrors due out on May 3 via Klonosphere Records/Season of Mist.

The follow-up to 2021’s third album Meandering Soul was recorded, mixed and mastered by Peter Deimel at Black Box Studio and sees Djiin further honing their exciting and powerful blend of psychedelic stoner rock and 70’s progressive rock. Written during the last four years by Chloé Panhaleyx (Vocals/Electric Harp), Allan Guyomard (Drums/Backing Vocals), Tom Penaguin (Guitar/Backing Vocals) and Charlélie Pailhes (Bass/Backing Vocals), "Mirrors" is full of powerful and fuzzy riffs, twisted beats, psychedelic melodies and vocal incantations that invites listeners to embark on transcendental and magical journey. The use of the electric harp in this “classic” rock line-up adds a unique and surprising sonority that accentuate the band’s mystic and ritualistic universe.

Watch the intense ‘Blind’ here:

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Shrine Of Reflection – Child of the World

Posted: 10 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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25th November 2022

James Wells

Time marches on, and here we are almost midway through December still catching up with November releases, this time with Polish ‘dark rock’ duo Shrine Of Reflection.

There’s a great temptation to split hairs and that argue that surely the dark rock tag is goths pretending not to be goth, but that would be unjust, as this six-and-a-half-minute sonic adventure is more post-rock than anything, but there are also hints of prog and bleak neofolk vibes emanating from the murky tones, where a sparse, spindly lead line drifts over a slow, deliberate thunder-like beat that plods away like a heavy heart, before it blossoms into colour at the midpoint into an expansive, cinematic sweep.

The blurbage summarises that “‘Child Of The World’ is a song inspired by the movie, Interstellar. It’s about the misery of a human being who is trapped on planet Earth and who is unable to discover the truth of the universe’s nature despite the fact of being its child. All this person can do is just simply stare at the sky and dream.”

That sense of entrapment is relatable, but more than this, the vocals become increasingly cracked and desperate as the song progresses, before the slow-building crescendo takes over, finally tapering off into muffled samples that leave you looking into the emptiness, and wondering.

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Paul K – The Space Between

Posted: 23 September 2022 in Albums
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21st October 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been almost three years since Paul K delivered Reconstructed Memories. Listening to The Space Between, it becomes apparent why. Pandemic or nay, this is an ambitious and complex album which sees Paul return to the territory explored on 2018’s The Fermi Paradox and go the whole hog on devising and scoring a vast conceptual progressive work that’s heavily invested in narrative as it traces what he outlines as being a story ‘about an astronaut who has volunteered for a one way journey through space to pass through the Heliopause and is set maybe 30/50 years in the future.’

Space is both the backdrop and the story, in many ways, and the fascination it holds is something that transcends words or even rational explanation. Perhaps the fact that the sheer enormity and infiniteness of space is beyond our comprehension is a major factor in our space obsession. And however far and deep we probe, I suspect we will never truly be capable of assimilating the universe, especially as we, as a species, struggle to comprehend that we do not exist at its centre.

In classic sci-fi form and echoing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the concept behind the story is that the astronaut’s sole companion is an AI robot that becomes sentient during the journey, before the astronaut eventually dies and the robot continues the journey alone.

As Paul explains, ‘Each track plots the journey from liftoff looking back at the Earth (True Splendour) to the debilitating effect of years alone in space (Pareidolia) and is also related to the love and loss the astronaut has felt in his life’.

Understatement is the album’s defining feature. While it is unquestionably ambitious and incorporates cinematic arrangements, and notably choral-sounding vocals, the instrumentation is subtle and layered.

‘True Splendour’ makes for a gentle introduction and very much sets the tone. The Space Between keeps the drama and pomp to a minimum, and instead, the mood is contemplative, almost subdued, as strolling basslines wander sedately through soft washes of sound. Percussion is minimal, and low in the mix.

‘Sleep Within’ is perhaps the album’s most conventional ‘rock’ composition, but there’s a subdued, soporific overlay to its mid-pace melodic drift, although the reflective, wistful ‘Spektr’ has a certain solidity to it. In contrast, ‘Artifact’, the point at which the AI assumes autonomy, is almost vaporous, a soft piano reverberating among wispy sonic contrails.

The Space Between is an album that functions on numerous levels simultaneously, although they’re not all necessarily obvious. But it’s not imperative to follow the narrative to appreciate the detail; the album works in a way that not only creates space, but conveys space, the eternal distance, the vast emptiness… we are all lost and floating. But some are more lost than others. Welcome to The Space Between.

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Watch: ‘Yonder’ by Klone

Posted: 21 June 2019 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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In recent years, French atmospheric rockers Klone have built their name on making music that’s as deeply introspective as it is sonically powerful. Le Grand Voyage, the band’s first release for UK post-progressive specialists Kscope on 20th September, is an album brimming with that sense of searching and self-discovery, its 10 tracks living up to its name in unabashed no-stone-unturned existential exploration.

“Our music allows the listener to travel and ask, ‘What is the spirit? What is the matter?’ and those kinds of questions,” says guitarist Guillaume Bernard. “The title refers to the wandering of the mind. It all came our singer [Yann Ligner] who came up with something in English like ‘The Great Journey’. We all liked the meaning but weren’t sure how it sounded. Eventually we realised it would be easy enough for people to translate and understand in our native tongue.”

Much of the inspiration on forthcoming singles ‘Breach’, ‘Keystone’, and ‘Hidden Passenger’ came from pondering the great philosophies of life, those eternal unanswered questions like who we are, where we are going and, ultimately, what happens next. It was the uncertainty and confusion surrounding mortality, the notion that something or nothing awaits us, which felt like an unlimited creative playground for the French art-rockers.

You can watch the video here:

Listen: ‘Winning a Losing Battle’ by Crippled Black Phoenix

Posted: 4 October 2016 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Crippled Black Phoenix have revealed the second track from their forthcoming album Bronze. The UK dark progressive rockers will release their stunning new full-length on November 4th.

New track  ‘Winning A Losing Battle’ can be streamed here:

 

Justin Greaves comments: “Some songs depart from my mind into reality without consent. ‘Winning A Losing Battle’ is one of those. The track just barged itself into the world. It is also one of the musically unconventional Crippled Black Phoenix style of songs that keep appearing on our albums. The title says it all. We have been through a lot of adversity as a band in these past two years and even though it seemed that all is doomed at times – I/we never gave up or gave in. We just say ‘screw you’ to the people and forces that tried to bring us down. Crippled Black Phoenix win, and always will.”