Cover art by Angela Casey

Style: Progressive rock, progressive metal (mixed vocals, mostly clean)
Recommended for fans of: The Dear Hunter, Coheed and Cambria, Baroness, The Protomen
Country: United States
Release date: 24 April 2026

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One of the most wonderful things about creating an indie prog band is the sheer amount of creative freedom it brings. After all, in a genre with such a long and storied history of nonlinear song structures, wild lyrical concepts, and profligate sonic borrowing from practically every other style of music under the sun, it has never been so viable to simply take bits of every genre you happen to enjoy, mix them all into a big cauldron, add a healthy lyrical dose of whatever weird topics you’ve been reading about lately, and serve the resulting stew as a brand new album. 

Such has been the recipe for scrappy Connecticut duo Shagohod, a pair of independent multi-instrumentalists who have been blending their many interests into eclectic concept-prog chowder ever since that fateful day in 2015 when they decided to start a band during a drunken Metal Gear Solid binge.¹ Their last effort, Tin, Gold, Lead and Blood, was a sprawling, wildly ambitious ride through the Old West that showed considerable potential despite (and, in some cases, because of) its drastically hit-or-miss levels of quality. Now, the dynamic duo of Dave Coffey and Drew Bligh have returned with A Curse that Hides the Door, a new opus that aims to take on heavy themes of human mortality through the lens of Egyptian mythology and cheesy pulp adventure stories. It’s one hell of a task, but the pair have thrown themselves into it with all their heart. Now all that’s left is to weigh said heart on Anubis’ scales, and see whether it holds more weight than a feather.

Just as they have on their earlier albums, Shagohod are clearly having a blast throwing in bits and pieces of whatever styles happen to tickle their fancy, genre be damned. From dramatic symphonic prog to fuzzed-out, blues-inflected desert rock to sleek, pulsating synthwave a la Gunship, there’s a massive amount of ground covered here. Yet compared to previous efforts, there’s a greater sense of cohesion and consistency, a clear drive to go beyond the simple contrasts of “Okay, this one is the bluesy acoustic one, this is the synthy one, now we’re doing doom metal, etc.” Indeed, much of the composition on A Curse That Hides the Door switches between the various facets of their style with enough alacrity that songs seldom feel like gimmicks. Big, swaggering prog metal riffs give way to lush layers of strings and acoustic guitars (“Swashbuckle Up”), while peppy, upbeat Coheed worship effortlessly transitions into a pensive bossa-nova sax solo (“The Book of the Living”). Indeed, as that last example shows, this fluidity of style helps greatly in keeping things from feeling too derivative even when they’re pulling directly from their influences—sure, “Scavengers” may have some melodic flourishes pulled straight from Act III-era The Dear Hunter, but its foreboding, synthy bridge, in which guest Kris Ryan pulls off the rare feat of making a spoken-word passage actually interesting, is all original.

Beyond the bells and whistles of their genre-fluidity, though, Shagohod also acquit themselves decently well in terms of the base-level meat and potatoes of songwriting and musicianship. While lights-out virtuosity is hardly the main focus, Coffey and Bligh wear their various instrumental hats quite well. Coffey’s drumming weaves around the songs’ various meters in a manner both propulsive and tasteful, only truly showing off in a brief moment in “Tomb”, while Bligh’s guitars offer enough distortion and grit to set the group apart as heavier than the average Dear Hunter-like with some solid lead work to boot; the solo on “In Linen, Entwined” is particularly choice. Meanwhile it’s interesting to see the pair’s relative strengths at work in the many auxiliary instruments; Coffey’s acoustic keys often take the lead with tasteful pianos and energetic organ solos alike, while Bligh’s synthscapes and string arrangements provide a thoroughly immersive sonic backdrop. The compositions, too, have plenty to offer, with dramatic, heart-stirring buildups and memorable melodies in abundance. The album’s final three-song suite in particular (including its massive, climactic eleven-minute title track) offers multiple genuinely gorgeous buildups capable of making listeners’ hearts catch in their throats.

And yet, for all its strides towards transcendence, A Curse That Hides the Door is nonetheless afflicted with a litany of flaws that keep it shackled to the realm of mortals. Part of this is a lack of compositional polish in a few songs—though the aforementioned peaks of the album’s songwriting are absolute treasures, the valleys (e.g. “The Rakehell”) can sometimes feel melodically clumsy and in need of another draft to remove their awkward extra beats. This is exacerbated by the vocals, which come across as the most obviously “DIY” element of Shagohod‘s otherwise passably professional sound. To be fair, the pair aren’t terrible vocalists by any stretch and can carry a tune, but they clearly aren’t singers by trade either, and thus their performances are a decidedly mixed bag. Bligh’s nasally tenor, for instance, manages heartfelt sweetness and emotional resonance on closer “The Book of the Living”, but he’s hopelessly out of his depth shooting for menace on “In Linen, Entwined”. Coffey’s baritone is generally smoother and more pleasant in timbre, and at his best, he genuinely elevates the likes of “Tomb” and “Crimson Rain”. At his worst, however, we have “Sycophant”, a bizarre, punk-influenced misfire that stands out as the only real moment where the album’s stylistic experimentation misses the mark. It’s got some fun energy to its riffs, to be sure, but with its bafflingly atonal solo work and Coffey fuckin’ cursing with the goddamn enthusiasm of a dipshit twelve-year-old who discovered that some shitass words make his dumbfuck friends think he’s oh-so-fuckin’-edgy (bitch), it’s the sort of cringey lowlight that brings the album’s score down with its mere inclusion.²

A Curse That Hides the Door is an album about inevitable mortality, one whose vaguely sketched narrative points toward a tragic, near-apocalyptic attempt to break free of death itself before giving up and realizing the value of living our own flawed, finite lives—an interesting topic for an album that comes so frustratingly close to greatness. It is, in many ways, a tiny microcosm of humanity itself in all our glorious mortal imperfections. Like most of humanity, it tries a massive variety of ever-shifting means of expression, ranging from the transcendently lovely to the clumsy and embarrassing. Like most of humanity, its tone veers from the poetic and layered to the prosaic and unintentionally goofy, and it can’t quite stay on topic. And, like most of humanity, its judgment upon those scales of the dead is difficult to decide with a simple yes or no. Overall, if I were Anubis, I probably would let A Curse that Hides the Door pass on… but only after letting the crocodile-headed devourer Ammit take a few nibbles around the edges.

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Recommended tracks: “Swashbuckle Up”, “Tomb”, “II. Crimson Rain”, “IV. The Book of the Living”
You may also like: The Circle of Wonders, Moron Police, Professor Caffeine and the Insecurities
Final verdict: 7/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Shagohod is:
– Drew Bligh (guitars, vocals, bass, glockenspiel, synths, programming, string arrangements, choir arrangements, mandolin)
– Dave Coffey (drums, vocals, bass, piano, organ, rhodes, percussion)
With guests:
– Adam Schmidt (additional guitar solos, harsh vocals)
– Jeff Boratko (saxophone)
– Casey Grambo (choir backing vocals)
– Conner Black (choir backing vocals)
– Kris Ryan (written poetry)
– Invoke (string quartet)

1. In fact, for those who don’t know, the band name (along with their debut album The Treading Behemoth) is a reference to the nuclear tank from MGS 3. Cool idea, though it unfortunately has doomed them to a lifetime of people needing to append the word “band” to their name to find them in search engines. ↩︎
2. It’s also an odd break from the overall concept, abandoning imagery of jackals and graverobbers in favor of a straightforward set of pissy insults. Is it some kind of diss track towards Beni Gabor from The Mummy or something? ↩︎