7th studio record for this American band's heavy, powerful brand of prog metal. Featuring this time around a brand new vocalist, Tom S Englund of Evergrey.
Band mastermind, Nick Van Dyk, is quoted on the album saying: "I never want a song to feel like it drags, whether it's four minutes or fourteen minutes long, and often, the driving force behind some of our longest songs isn't the music but the words. If you're dealing with a topic that starts in a dark place and tells a story of struggle and meditates on what it is to be human, and then ends in a place of positivity – which a lot of our music does – it's not credible to have a verse where somebody is in a dark place and then two lines later everything is fine. Like the real-life situations that we're talking about, whether it be recovering from failure, dealing with the end of a chapter in our lives, coming to terms with one's mortality or experiencing a betrayal and struggling through its impact, whatever it might be, these things are a process of discovery and contemplation and reflection and they take time to unfold."
This is cool