Style: Progressive metal, power metal
Recommended for fans of: Green Carnation, Symphony X, Dream Theater, Majestica
Country: Tunisia & France
Release date: 27 March 2026

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A first impression is the most honest listen you’ll ever have, and sometimes the most punishing. When I sit down with an album, I try, as a matter of some-but-not-absolute principle, to approach it on its own terms—no comparisons to past work or other genre makers, no reputation to confirm or confound. I don’t always succeed, but with Myrath, the progressive metal vets behind Wilderness of Mirrors, I at least had a fighting chance since this is my introduction to them. Whether coming in blind did the album any favors is harder to say. A listener familiar with their catalog might have known what to expect, or been predisposed to forgive. I had neither buffer—I just hit play—and Myrath told me exactly who they were.

The band hails from Tunisia, and their best moments draw on North African musical flavors. Instruments like the saz and the qraqeb, combined with vocal harmonies and string melodies that owe as much to the Mediterranean coast as to the European metal that surrounds them, all integrate into the band’s progressive power metal concoction in ways that are genuine, not just decorative. Opener, “The Funeral,” is the fullest expression of that identity: a five-minute thesis statement built on kinetic guitar work, a soaring and infectious vocal performance from Zaher Zorgati, and a sense of joyful cultural synthesis that makes the band sound like few others in the progressive metal landscape. It’s my favorite individual song that I’ve heard so far this year.

That identity doesn’t vanish after “The Funeral”, but it does stop commanding the room. What carries Wilderness of Mirrors through its remaining nine tracks is Zorgati’s voice, which is, to put it plainly, exceptional. His upper register is vast and his vibrato pulsating (without being distracting), and he deploys both in service of melodies so haltingly catchy that they are instantly familiar, destined to click into place exactly as they are. The production is immaculate throughout; the musicianship is never in question; and the band’s North African influences remain a genuine presence rather than window dressing. For a good stretch of the album’s first half, that’s more than enough.

The first sign of trouble, though, arrives in the album’s latter half. “Soul of My Soul” is a slower, more restrained affair than its predecessors, a quasi-ballad that breaks the album’s steady pace. Every time I get to his track, the realization that the momentum had already quietly stopped hits me. The song isn’t the album’s weakest moment, but the change in texture is what makes me notice that I’ve been quietly drifting. Somewhere between “The Funeral” and here the music shifted from something that I was actively listening to into something I was passively receiving. The culprit isn’t any single song so much as a gradual envelopment in overly similar compositional structures and melodies—riffs that are made up more of chord progressions than individual notes, rhythms that settle and stay settled, and the vocal work carrying the weight of every composition.

Momentary exceptions exist, of course, like the spastic guitar licks of “The Clown” or standout “Still the Dawn Will Come.” In the latter, a bombastic chorus anchors a poppy verse and a djentastic breakdown. Its strings pull double duty, providing those North African textures in the bridges, and more Western-infused power metal accompaniment in the chorus. But ultimately, Wilderness of Mirrors is front-loaded. The songs don’t collapse in the back half so much as they recede. They’re competent and polished, but increasingly difficult to tell apart. Closer, “Through the Seasons,” briefly bucks the trend: a catchy chorus, a riffy bridge, and strings that demand your attention rather than merely request it. That it arrives so late, and still can’t quite reach the heights of anything on the front half, makes for an album of diminishing returns.

Wilderness of Mirrors really hangs on “The Funeral” alone—a song so immediately impactful that it sets a bar the rest of the record can’t possibly clear. That’s the particular cruelty of a track that served both as my introduction to Myrath and the album’s opening statement: it recalibrates your expectations in real time, and everything after it gets measured against a standard it didn’t ask to set. Myrath know who they are, and they showed me in the first five minutes. I spent the remaining 40 waiting for them to show me again.

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Recommended tracks: The Funderal, Les Engants Du Soleil, Still the Dawn Will Come
You may also like: Seventh Wonder, Vanden Plas, Anubis Gate
Final verdict: 6/10

Related links: Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: earMusic

Myrath is:
– Malek Ben Arbia (guitars)
– Morgan Berthet (drums)
– Kévin Codfert (keyboards, backing vocals)
– Anis Jouini (bass)
– Zaher Zorgati (lead vocals)
With guests:
– Wassin Bibi (choirs)
– Radhi Chaouali (violin, qraqeb)
– Cheikh Diallo (backing vocals)
– Fehmi Mbarki (saz)
– Galya Nikolaeva (choirs)
– Elize Ryd (vocals)
– Charly Sahona (guitars)
– Frank Serafine (choirs)