Album art by Antonio “DULK” Segura

Style: Progressive rock, pop rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Haken, Thank You Scientist, Closure in Moscow, The Dear Hunter, Bear Ghost
Country: Norway
Release date: 28 November 2025

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It is one of the great paradoxes of storytelling that, in order to create a powerful, dark narrative drama with gripping stakes, it is often best to start in the realm of lighthearted comedy. Something about levity makes that turn towards gravitas hit even harder, and perhaps prog’s greatest example of this phenomenon is Norway’s own Moron Police. They, as their name may suggest, spent much of the 2010s goofing around with musically promising yet lyrically juvenile tunes with such titles as “T-Bag Your Grandma” before abruptly exploding onto the scene with their landmark 2019 record A Boat on the Sea. Though it was sonically brighter and peppier than its predecessors, with catchy melodies jam-packed into its half-hour runtime like clowns into a tiny car, it also offered considerable depth beneath the surface, both in the geopolitical commentary of its lyrics and the deceptive complexity of its lush arrangements. A pitch-perfect blend of wild, zany fun and sugar-sweet melodies with heartfelt messaging and progressive musicianship, it deservedly drew a fair bit of positive attention.

But that was six years ago, and as sizable a shift toward the serious as that album was for the Morons, their evolution was still undergoing. Two years later, they would toss out The Stranger and the Hightide EP – a country-inflected diversion from their main style, but nonetheless a good time, and a positive sign that their promised next full-length would continue seeking new sounds. Unfortunately, real life would soon take an unexpectedly dark turn for the band, with founding drummer Thore Pettersen abruptly passing away a few months after the EP’s release. This tragedy, by all accounts, hit the band quite hard, and caused the already ambitious Pachinko to face considerable delays as they figured out how to proceed without him. But proceed they did, and after a lengthy process that involved recruiting Billy Rymer (of The Dillinger Escape Plan) to take on drumming duties, the beast known as Pachinko is at long last complete. Have the years of painstaking labor managed to produce a worthy new chapter in the band’s legacy?

In short, yes. In long, hell fucking yes. This album is an absolute labor of love, the sort of towering, intricate magnum opus you only really get from a small group of extremely talented, passionate people striving at their craft for years on end. For as great as A Boat on the Sea was, Pachinko exceeds it in practically every dimension; it’s nearly twice as long, sure, but more impressive is the way Moron Police have still somehow managed to make their sound even denser, taking an hour of runtime and cramming two hours’ worth of musical ideas into it. The foremost evidence of this is, as always, the surfeit of infectious, exhilaratingly anthemic melodies that frontman Sondre Skollevoll somehow keeps cranking out one after another with nary a miss to be found. The guy might just be the single best crafter of hooks in all of prog right now, full stop, and his excellent vocals imbue every addictive chorus with a powerful yet warm tone that goes down smoother than hot chocolate on a cold evening. I could list out my favorite examples, but we’d be here all day – suffice to say that it’s an absolute embarrassment of riches in both quality and quantity, a joyous thrill ride offering a dizzying array of reprises and leitmotifs while still keeping things fresh and new at every turn.

Beyond its abundance of killer tunes, though, Pachinko is an incredible expansion in scope and ambition, a magnificently multifaceted showcase of the many tools at the band’s disposal that makes its already vibrant predecessor feel downright one-dimensional by comparison. Sure, you’ve got the classic high-energy Moron Police bangers, with the mid-album one-two punch of “King Among Kittens” and “Take Me to the City” serving as particularly stellar examples of the poppy-yet-intricate sugar rush that fans of A Boat on the Sea know and love. But there’s also a wide variety of other sounds and moods thrown into the mix, from the pulsating, bittersweet synth-pop of “Okinawa Sky” to the gentle acoustic ballad “Make Things Easier”, whose soft banjos evoke the pastoral warmth of a JRPG starting town’s soundtrack – a smart contrast to Boat‘s approach of keeping its foot constantly on the gas. 

The band have also leveled up massively as musicians, crafting the proggiest, most virtuosic music of their entire career. Time signatures shift on a dime, with verses often breathlessly skipping a beat or cramming in an extra one to keep listeners on their toes. Skollevoll’s guitar work shreds harder than ever, and his interplay with the album’s many guest players on tracks like “Alfredo and the Afterlife” creates some of the absolute gnarliest guitar/violin/horn unisons this side of Thank You Scientist. Lars Bjørknes’ keys and Christian Holtsteen’s bass also have their share of great moments (shoutout to the two consecutive synth solos in the intro to “The Apathy of Kings”), but the MVP is undoubtedly Rymer. He more than does the band’s late drummer justice, unleashing one crackling, effervescent fill after another while effortlessly driving the album’s innumerable shifts in dynamics, energy, and groove. 

And yet, perhaps the most special thing about Pachinko is the sheer emotional depth and thematic resonance it packs away behind its thin veneer of absurdism. True, A Boat on the Sea felt unexpectedly deep in spots, but in hindsight a lot of that perception came from the sheer novelty of the guys behind “Who’s That Chicken?” suddenly singing about the military industrial complex. This time, however, is different – we’ve got an entire concept album on our hands, one touching on grief, capitalistic artifice, and the search for self-identity in a world whose God has abandoned it. The central imagery of being turned into a sentient pachinko machine, while silly on its surface, serves as a genuinely profound metaphor for surrendering one’s agency to the whims of capital and society at large. Unlike the seemingly similar pinball machine, pachinko involves no skill, no real input, just the random chance and physics of a steel ball fired through a maze of pins and flashing lights. It’s a deeply nihilistic image, but a strangely hopeful one as well, learning to find joy in the bonds we make and the songs we sing as we bounce haplessly through the world in the absence of any higher power. And, of course, the entire album acts as an elegy to Pettersen, with “Okinawa Sky” and “Cormorant” serving as particularly direct tributes to his memory. In both, there is the sense of the grief being too great to sing directly, with the former covering its heartfelt bridge in thick layers of vocoder effects while the latter opts for a soaring, orchestral reprise of the “I am lost without you” chorus from A Boat on the Sea‘s “The Phantom Below”. It’s a transcendent, spine-chilling moment, especially when Rymer comes in pounding out blast beats so urgent that it’s as if they’re meant to breach the veil of the afterlife and reach their fallen friend, wherever he may be.

The centerpiece of Pachinko is its gargantuan, two-part title track, comprising sixteen minutes of explosive riffs, kaleidoscopic genre switches, and some of the most indelibly brilliant shout-along choruses I’ve heard in my goddamn life. It is, in many ways, the album in microcosm, but it also contains the album’s sole flaw – namely, the return of the doofy, clownish vibes that the band seemed on track to grow out of entirely. So much of the album successfully integrates the joyous whimsy of their youth into a more mature, coherent sound, but bits like the “MEE I’M A TECHNO BOY” in Part 1 and the oh-so-quirky verses of Part 2 end up sounding like odd, grating leftovers from a dorkier time. Yet, the more I sit with these weird diversions, the less I mind them – sure, they’re a bit cringe, but you don’t name your band fuckin’ Moron Police without believing, deep down, that to be cringe is to be human. And given that this album is dedicated to the memory of someone who was, from what I gather, a key contributor to the sense of humor that characterized the band’s early years, I suppose I can forgive the lads for wanting to pay a quick bit of tribute to those times, warts and all.  

And that’s what Pachinko is at the end of the day – a deeply human work of art. It examines how our flawed, mortal selves cope with the wild, uncaring crapshoot that is existence through the fanatical constructs of faith and the gilded masks of fame and wealth, and how the two might not be that different from one another after all. It’s a celebration of songs and art breaching the artifice of capitalism and performativity to form genuine connections between us, of the marks those connections leave with us even when those we loved are dead and gone. It’s an album that made me bounce around in my seat grinning like an idiot right before delivering a roundhouse kick straight to the feels that left me teary-eyed and awestruck – the sort of music that snaps your heart in two before healing it right back again. Moron Police may have had an exhausting, drawn-out set of bounces through the pachinko machine of existence for these past few years, but at long last, they have landed on one hell of a jackpot.

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Recommended tracks: Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call), Cormorant, Pachinko Pt. 1, Take Me To the City, The Apathy of Kings, Giving Up the Ghost
You may also like: Major Parkinson, Meer, Toehider, Cheeto’s Magazine
Final verdict: 9.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Mighty Jam Music Group

Moron Police is:
– Sondre Skollevoll (Guitars, vocals, backing vocals, synths, piano, double bass, desert bass, banjo, percussion, programming, string & horn arrangements)
– Lars Christian Bjørknes (Synths, piano, organs, melodica, percussion, backing vocals, programming, string & horn arrangements)
– Christian Frederik Holtsteen (Bass, fretless bass)
– Thore Omland Pettersen (Drum outro on “Giving Up the Ghost”)
With guests:
– Billy Rymer (Drums)
– William Grøv Skramsett (Trumpet)
– Morten Norheim (Saxophone)
– Claudia Cox, Marius Westling, Oleg Bezuglov, Gabriel Bastos (Violins)
– Simen Hallset (Backing vocals)
– Edgar Vivas (Cello)
– Felipe Manuel Sosa (Oboe)
– Robert Julian Badenhope Hvistendahl (Percussion)