PopMatters' 10 Best Progressive Rock / Metal Albums of 2020

With 'Alphaville', the enigmatic New York City Extreme Metal trio has successfully broken with all genre conventions and elevated into a realm of Avantgarde Metal that is as fascinating as it is scary. Not that conventions ever held back Imperial Triumphant, but this album is certainly their most obscure and experimental yet. The good news is that it's not at the cost of intensity. The demanding, yet always intriguing clash of jarring atonality and gloomy Jazz fusion ('City Swine') finds its match only in the city it is so openly inspired by. There is plenty of both ends of the spectrum - and everything in between - on 'Alphaville', which will undoubtedly go down in history as the band's magnum opus. For fans of: Ved Buens Ende, Portal, Oranssi Pazuzu Under exclusive license from Century Media. TDW023

Wobbler´s fifth offering is an exciting blend of carefully planned and jammed material that encompasses everything the band has done up to now. Dwellers of the Deep consists of four distinctive pieces and is a broad looking glass into Wobbler´s creative whims and playful exuberance. The album showcases the band´s mastery of dynamics and flow, with passages and themes veering from the scenic and serene to the downright rocking. The lyrical themes on the album deals with human emotion, and the ongoing struggle between juxtaposed forces within the psyche. An introspective voyage among the realms of memories, feelings and instincts, where the light is brighter, and the dark is darker. The concepts of wonder, longing and desperation permeates the histories told, and the currents from the deep are ever present.

\"When we were finishing everything up and getting this music finalized, this record feels like all of our previous stuff wrapped up together, which you don\'t always end up with,\" vocalist/guitarist Brett Campbell tells Apple Music about Pallbearer\'s fourth album. Equally cathartic and melancholic, the record\'s eight tracks grapple with the strangeness of memory and the concept of time, with heavy subjects surrounding disease, death, and loss anchoring songs like \"Caledonia\" and the title track. Produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth), *Forgotten Days* incorporates moments of soaring prog-rock (\"Stasis\" and \"Silver Wings\"), furious thrash (\"The Quicksand of Existing\"), and sweeping aggression (\"Vengeance & Ruination\") into the band\'s relentless doom metal sound, threaded together in a cohesive collection that showcases Pallbearer at their darkest. \"I like the dynamism in general,\" says Campbell. \"I feel like on this album, each song is notably different from each other while maintaining some similar elements as well.\" Below, Campbell walks Apple Music track by track through *Forgotten Days*. **Forgotten Days** “This song was inspired by these ideas of identity and memory, sort of inspired by seeing my grandmother go through Alzheimer\'s over the last several years and just watching her slip away. She\'s still alive, but there are fewer and fewer recognizable moments of her being in there. I just used it to explore the themes of how much your memories of your life or your conception of yourself—how does that define who you are? If you can only remember versions of yourself from long ago, are you lost in time? A lot of Alzheimer\'s patients seem like they are displaced, because they have these memories that to them seem current, but it could be from 50 years ago. I feel it\'s got to be a very strange way to exist.” **Riverbed** “The skeleton of that song is from \[bassist\] Joe \[Rowland\]. So he demoed it and sent it to us, and I really liked it from the very initial moment. It sounds new, it sounds different than our old stuff. It\'s got the trade-off vocals—Joe does the softer vocals, and I do my typical thing. It will probably end up being a live staple, if we ever get to play shows again.” **Stasis** “I\'ve been flirting with writing more rock-ish songs lately. I wanted to have more of a swagger and groove to it rather than either something that hammers or big sweeping sort of stuff that we often do. I just wanted to test the limits of the Pallbearer format. The lyrics on that are essentially a reminder to not get stuck in shitty behavioral patterns that just drag down. Because you really only have so long to live, and if you waste lots of time just wallowing in misery or just the patterns that you\'re comfortable with, you don\'t get that time back.” **Silver Wings** “I always like to write at least one long, epic song per album. That\'s probably my favorite of mine on the album. And it\'s kind of concerned with similar ideas as \'Forgotten Days.\' I think I sort of have a fixation with this sort of concept in general. Just the idea of the unstoppable march of time and the inevitability of change. You find a person at a time that they\'re much different than they once were.” **The Quicksand of Existing** “We ended up really kind of having a ball over Devin \[Holt\]\'s guitar solo. We do a trade-off in the middle. Mine is the sort of more florid-sounding one, and then Devin just comes in with the fucking face-melting, fucking *Reload* guitar. You can hear the black-nail-polish-era Kirk Hammett rocking out. We were losing our minds in the studio when he recorded that, laughing our asses off. It\'s probably our simplest song we\'ve ever done, but it\'s a lot of fun to play.” **Vengeance & Ruination** “I\'ve had kind of a difficult time coming up with lyrics for that song because the music itself is so aggressive. I was kind of trying to approach it almost like a hardcore song, although it really ended up not sounding like that. I saw these pictures from probably 120 years ago of these victims of the death by a thousand cuts where they\'d like flay you alive, this Chinese capital punishment. It\'s horrifically, incomprehensibly cruel. And I use that as a jumping-off point as a kind of discussion of a state-sponsored cruelty.” **Rite of Passage** “Solstice is kind of one of our influences from early on. And we\'ve always really enjoyed that stuff, just kind of classic epic doom. And we haven\'t really done a straightforward Solstice-esque song before. So we just went for it. I think that the chorus ended up being pretty cool in that, because once we got to the studio, one of Randall\'s suggestions was to play the chorus on the toms instead of just playing it through, which I think was a really great suggestion and it opened up the chorus a lot.” **Caledonia** “It\'s pretty fucking weird. The really bizarre guitar solo from Devin, quadruple-track harmonies on there, I think it\'s pretty rad. But it\'s also just crushingly sad. That was another one of those songs about dealing with his mother\'s death. It\'s pretty heavy subject matter, but I like all the various textures and directions that that song goes in. It feels inherently progressive in the sense that there are so many different sonic directions throughout that song. It flows really well together and doesn\'t seem disjointed, which it could have felt with all the different things going on.”

When it came time to record the vocals for *Long Day Good Night*, Fates Warning singer Ray Alder was living under strict pandemic lockdown rules in his adopted home of Madrid, Spain. “You couldn’t go to a studio and record, but one of the things you could legally do was move,” the native Texan tells Apple Music. “So I hired a moving van and packed it with clothes and a bed and moved into the recording studio. I slept in the vocal booth for two weeks and lived off of microwave food. It was awful, but it got done.” With a total running time of an hour and 12 minutes, the aptly titled *Long Day Good Night* is the longest album of the American prog-metal squad’s 36-year career. As Alder explains in the track-by-track commentary below, it might also be their last. **The Destination Onward** “To me, this song is about knowing what’s coming and questioning what is ahead. It’s as if you question what’s coming, but it doesn’t matter because it’s coming anyway. It’s not something you can really get ready for. After I wrote it, I realized that it’s about what’s happening with the band, and one day it’s going to end. But for the moment, we keep moving. These are really fucking depressing lyrics, but it’s just what was happening when we were writing the album.” **Shuttered World** “This is another of those things where I didn’t realize what it really meant to me until after I wrote it. Listening to the song, I realized it’s about avoiding reality. It’s similar to ‘The Destination Onward’—you know what’s coming, you know what the reality is of things, but you deny what\'s going to happen. And then you somehow kind of realize what is coming and you have to live with it. And you’ve got to come to terms with it. And that goes for anything—the end of a job, or whatever it may be.” **Alone We Walk** “One day I ended up walking from the center of Madrid to where we live, which is way outside the city—about eight miles or so. Of course when I was in the middle of the city, I was surrounded by people. As I got further away from the city center, there were less and less people until it got to where it was just me. I ended up in a park by myself and just kind of contemplating life. It was one of those moments that I think everyone has where you just want to be alone with your feelings.” **Now Comes the Rain** “This is basically saying that when you fail, you have to get back up on your feet. I think it’s happened to all of us before. Of course, everyone\'s afraid of failure in some way, shape, or form. And that\'s, I think, what keeps a lot of people from moving forward, because they\'re afraid to fail. But I think ‘Now Comes the Rain’ is sort of saying that it’s going to happen but you\'ll be fine in the end.” **The Way Home** “So this was inspired by Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, that plane that went missing a few years ago. Jim Matheos, our guitarist and composer, and I were talking about it one day, and it happened to be while I was working on this song. I thought it was a really great subject. The very beginning is about a person getting on the flight. The second part is about the pilot and whatever is going through his mind. And the third part is about the families dealing with the aftermath. It’s a weird song, and you’d never know what it was about unless I explained it.” **Under the Sun** “Originally, this wasn’t a full song—it was actually a piece of another song. But Jim sent it to me—that acoustic part at the beginning—and thought we could build another song out of it. So we did. And the chorus melody was actually something I came up with a few months earlier, before I’d even heard this music. But we put them together and it worked really great. I’m not going to explain the lyrics, because they’re weird and I think they’ll just bring everyone down. Let’s just say it has to do with age.” **Scars** “This is one of the heaviest songs on the album, which I think is really cool. It talks about how whatever happens to you in your life, everything leaves a scar. There are remnants involved, and there’s things that happen to you when you’re younger that stay with you your whole life.” **Begin Again** “I think this one’s pretty obvious. It goes back to ‘Now Comes the Rain’—you don’t win at everything in life, but you pick yourself up and start again. You can’t let life beat you down.” **When Snow Falls** “When Jim first sent this to me, I didn’t know if it was going to fit on the album because it’s so different from the other songs. We thought it might be a bonus track for a Japanese CD or something, but once we really started working on it, we all fell in love with it. But we were pressed for time and our drummer, Bobby Jarzombek, was still working on other stuff. So Jim asked Gavin Harrison from Porcupine Tree to play drums on it, and he did an amazing job. I think it’s one of the coolest songs on the album.” **Liar** “‘Liar’ is about the current situation in America and how the country is so divided. I never wrote lyrics about a political situation before, and I’ve never cared so much about politics as I have in the last four years. Obviously this stuff has been there forever, but the fact that people think it’s okay to be a fucking racist asshole is fascinating to me. I live in Europe now, but I’ll never give up my American citizenship. I love America, but I’m ashamed of my country right now. I’ve never seen anything like it.” **Glass Houses** “This is basically about everyone being connected to their phones and how the world has become so dependent on social media. I’m guilty of it myself. The first thing I look at when I wake up is Twitter, because that’s where I get my news. I follow so many journalists to find out everything that’s happening around the world. It’s really ridiculous, but I’m the guy that wakes up and looks at his phone like, ‘Oh god…what? Oh no.’ It’s like a dependency or compulsion.” **The Longest Shadow of the Day** “I think on the last three albums we’ve done, the last song is usually the big prog centerpiece of the album. This time it’s second to last, and this one is Jim’s song. I knew it was going to be a really long one when he was working on it, so I was worried there was going to be a lot of lyrics. But in the end, he sent me three verses of lyrics. As far as the meaning, you’d have to ask him—but personally I think it’s a pretty deep song.” **The Last Song** “It’s funny that this is called ‘The Last Song’ because I think it may have been the last song we worked on. It’s odd because I think it’s the first time Jim and I ever co-wrote lyrics. I started writing about the band itself and what we’ve done all these years—there’s a line about walking down the only path I’ve ever known, which, for me, has been music for the last 35 years. That’s what I’ve lived my life for. And then Jim kind of tied it back to the first couple of songs on the album, because the band is going to end sometime. I think Jim no longer wants to write new music for Fates Warning. I think this may be our last album. And this was a kind of way to say that. We all still want to tour, but as far as new music, I think it’s done.”