An end-of-year report: our 2019 underground progressive metal albums of the year!

Hello there reader! No shitty introduction with my weirdness this time. Just a good old-fashioned greeting. What a year it has been for this blog! Looking back at how this whole thing started I have to say that I’m astonished by how far this has gotten. Nearly two years ago in July 2018, I started posting some notes on underground progressive metal bands I dug up from the depths of Metal-Archives. It was nothing too formal or professional, just a bunch of notes of some dude who had barely any idea on how to write. Now fast forward 20 months and we have our own website (albeit a mediocre one, if only we could get the word wrapping to work…), a team of 10 people (including a marketing advisor of all things), are doing interviews, have social media accounts and we’re planning to do even more. It’s pretty damn incredible.

Now for a little bit of history (you can skip the next two paragraphs if you want): I was originally inspired by that person on r/Metal who posts weekly updates on what has been released in metal. However I went completely overboard and put in not just a link to bandcamp, but ALL related links for the bands. I also included an FFO section and the style of prog metal, so it became quite lengthy. I guess it’s no wonder that with all that effort put in the cosmetics of the post, I also started putting more effort into the actual reviews. Since I’m the perfectionist that I am, I got burned out after 6 posts. Hence I got some other folks on board to help with reviewing in Dylan and Jonah. Less albums to review meant we could go more in depth on each of them.

This lineup was steady for a while, but after the 2018 AOTY post, Jonah left briefly, and we got into reviewer turmoil. First we got Daniel and another Dylan, but the former had to leave after two editions due to work and the latter didn’t even make the first one due to personal reasons. We got someone whose reviewer name was Volarus to replace Dylan the second, and Jonah re-joined after February so Daniel was also replaced. However Volarus suddenly disappeared off the face of the internet after April and no one has any idea what happened to him whatsoever. He was also very active on r/progmetal Discord by the name of Archopin. No one there has been able to find him either. Safe to say I had never seen such a successful internet disappearance in my life until then. ANYWAY. In April we got two more reviewers on board in Matt and Tyler, both professional prog metal musicians. Then a while later we got Josh and Stephen on board, and even further down the line Andrew and Chris got in here as well. It’s absolutely stunning. At some point it seemed like no matter how many new reviewers we added, there were always too fucking many good albums out there. What started with a little writing project has spiraled out of control completely and has become a serious website with a reputation.

So anyway, 2019. Last year’s edition I joked that an AOTY list in April was way too late, so I promised we would be earlier the next year, and here we are! We’ve moved up one whole week and now release our AOTY list at the end of March!!! Didn’t see that coming now, did ya? Jokes aside, this year was pretty damn incredible for progressive music. I don’t know if it’s just about us getting better at finding the good stuff in- and outside of Metal-Archives, or that the prog gods suddenly decided that we were worthy of good music after all, but the sheer size of great albums that came out in the scene this year is staggering. The variety among these albums is amazing too. From atmospheric power metal to cowboy sludge, to doom metal with a saxophone to djazzy prog, to heavy prog with a 29-minute epic, to old-school metal banshee vocals…and back. There’s just so much in here (and we still left out a bunch of fantastic albums). I’m absolutely thrilled to share these findings with all of you. I strongly believe we have something for every shade of prog fan in here.

With that said, it’s time to indulge! The post is structured the same as last year. Since we haven’t necessarily actually listened to each other’s albums, a ranked list wouldn’t have made much sense. Instead, we’ve cut up the post into a couple of tiers (three to be exact), indicating the general perceived quality (or rather, personal enjoyment) the reviewer had of said album. Inside each tier the albums are listed alphabetically to further emphasize that there is no order in our collective enjoyment of them. Our tastes are very diverse, so there’s no way we’d reach any consensus if we tried. It’s also for the sake of not reading text from the same reviewer over and over again that we did this. Keeping the writing style diverse makes for a much more engaging read. All the albums on this list have been featured on this blog. We mostly picked albums we reviewed ourselves, but sometimes you’ll also see someone talking about an album someone else has reviewed.

Now as a final thing before we delve into the body of the list, and I assume you’re familiar with this by now, is the practical information. Firstly, if you don’t want to/don’t have time to read the entire thing, we have a spreadsheet with a quick overview of all the albums featured. Also we have a Spotify playlist for each tier with the recommended tracks from albums we featured, but I won’t link this here. I can’t spoil the albums just yet now, can I?

So, to not keep you waiting for much longer, let’s hop in!