Hello everyone, and welcome to a special announcement regarding the future of The Progressive Subway!
The Progressive Subway was founded in 2018 by Sam to highlight the best bands in the progressive rock and metal underground. From humble beginnings of essentially posting collections of notes, the site evolved into a more serious blog of music criticism. Our definition of “underground” started at 5,000 Spotify monthly listeners or fewer and eventually settled on a more judicious threshold of 20,000. As time has gone on, that boundary has begun to make less and less sense. Progressive rock and metal are niche genres at best, the biggest bands in our scene have maybe four million monthly listeners—the global population is 8.2 billion; when looked at that way, all prog is underground, and there are plenty of bands we don’t cover who are still “underground” to the average prog fan. And so, we’ve decided to eliminate that threshold. Henceforth, we’ll be reviewing all prog rock and metal bands (and some related stuff we feel is within our remit); you’ll get to read our controversial opinions about all your favourites, from Dream Theater to Opeth, from King Gizzard to Devin Townsend, from Haken to Haken side projects.
To lovers of underground music and the underground bands that follow us: fear not! The prog scene is vast because the progressive underground is vast. For five years we’ve journeyed up and down the subway tracks (yes, as in a train subway, not a sandwich shop—you seriously never worked that out?!) in search of the best emerging bands and we’ve come to know and love many of them. And even if we didn’t love them, if the reviews were a bit mean sometimes, we’re still rooting for them. We will not forget our underground origins. Our hope is to grow the site in reach and output, in order to be able to highlight even more underground bands than ever before to an even larger audience, to become a thriving hub for prog fans to discover new things and discuss how wrong we are about, well, everything. In the new year, we will be publishing a few “best underground albums of the decade” posts, and features such as our “Lost in Time” series will remain committed to the underground scene. If you’re thinking “oh, they just want to put things like Caligula’s Horse and Blood Incantation on their end of year lists” then you clearly don’t realise what a great big bunch of haters we are (7/10s both of them; in fact, everything you love is a 7/10)!
The prog community is a wonderful, supportive place, but there aren’t so many critical sites; we see a lot of promotional sites where high scores are doled out like candy, who would vaunt the virtues of even renowned clunkers like Transitus, Sorceress, and The Astonishing. There’s nothing wrong with promotional sites, but when people are haters, you can at least trust that they’re being honest. Sure, we’re not quite AngryMetalGuy—more like SardonicProgElitists—but reviewing should have qualitative standards. You may not agree with us, in fact, you probably shouldn’t, but you can at least guarantee that we’re telling the truth about how we feel about an album. And then you can send us threatening comments!
There you have it. The Progressive Subway has officially connected to the overground lines. This is a brave new future for the site and we’re hoping our readers and the bands that have become a part of our little community will join us on the ride. Take a seat and get comfy, we’ll be stopping at some great recommendations, some hot takes, and some really scathing critiques of your music taste. Choo-choo!
