Review: Hourswill – Ensemble
Style: progressive metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Bruce Dickinson, Pain of Salvation, Fates Warning, Warrel Dane
Country: Portugal
Release date: 19 May 2026
As I approach album review number sixty here at the Subway, I’ve covered just about every prog and prog-adjacent subgenre I can think of. Yet, ironically, a style missing from my portfolio is traditional progressive metal. Shame on me. Bands like Dream Theater, Symphony X, and Queensrÿche got me into heavier progressive music over twenty years ago, and I still have an affinity for the sound. For whatever reason, though, no new releases in the style had called out to me for a review. It’s time to right my wrong.
The tracklist of Ensemble, latest release from the Portuguese quintet Hourswill, was enough to pique my interest: a twenty-three-minute epic kicking the album off after a short intro track, and a thirteen-minute closer bringing it home. And if that weren’t enough, the vocals of frontman Leonel Silva bear an uncanny resemblance to those of my all-time favorite vocalist, Bruce Dickinson—they don’t quite match the soaring style of Iron Maiden’s golden era, but rather the gravelly, lower register used heavily in Dickinson’s solo work during the ‘90s. Good enough for me! What better opportunity to go back to a genre I had unintentionally left behind?
Across its sixty-four minutes, Ensemble offers stylings reminiscent of progressive metal from the late ‘80s through the early ‘00s. The hook-forward “Depressione Anaclitica” has the melodic cheese (it’s prog, after all) and punchy, chord-heavy riffing of the genre’s early days, while the moody, acoustic bridge in the back half of “Not Enough” sounds straight out of Pain of Salvation’s 2002 masterpiece Remedy Lane—Silva even switches his Bruce Dickinson delivery for one matching PoS’s Daniel Gildenlöw. Sitting in the temporal middle is standout rocker “Unheilvoll,” with the heft, groove, and melody of an anthemic ‘90s cut from Bruce Dickinson. It may be the least progressive song on the album, but it’s easily the most memorable. The vocals are the focal point of the record, and although plenty of instrumental passages color the album—including the fully instrumental “Paso de Cuervo”—the musicianship is relatively tame by genre standards. The guitars focus more on straightforward, melodic riffing than on mind-bending phrasings, and the rare solo is always pleasant but never approaches virtuosic; the bass carries a nice growl but rarely moves far from the root; the drumming is consistently solid, though never flashy; and the keyboards are used sparsely and mostly for texture. While this all makes the music accessible and immediate, a bit of extra flair would make the hour-plus runtime more entertaining.
More detrimental to the runtime is that the songs tend to feel bloated. The twenty-three-minute “Le Radeau de la Méduse” (twenty-five if you count the two-minute intro track leading into it) simply doesn’t contain the diversity, dynamics, or compositional intrigue to justify its length. Too much of the track is based around repetitious riffs that ride a root note, punch a chord or run of chords, and then rinse and repeat. To its credit, the song does boast a nice Opethian bridge at its halfway point, as well as some clever dissonant leads toward the end accented by nearly growled vocals in the background. But on the whole, the track’s various passages and textures could have been run through in about half the time to greater effect. The same can be said of the thirteen-minute closer “Gehenna,” which riffs along in a style that the prior epic has already made stale—though the brooding, vocal-driven section that begins at the five-minute mark and exits into a big, uptempo riff is an album high point. Sitting between the two epics are more concise tracks, but even those could use some trimming. As neat as the melodic guitars are in “Paso de Cuervo,” they don’t quite justify a standalone instrumental; instead, they could have been folded into the other tracks. And while I appreciate the percussionless,1 sitar-infused Portuguese ballad “O que a Vida me Deu,”2 stylistically, it seems like an entirely random midpoint for the album. Weaving that spirit of compositional adventurousness more heavily and naturally into the rest of the material would have better served the album as a whole.
Despite my issues with Ensemble, it holds some solid chunks of traditional progressive metal, and Hourswill’s ambition must be applauded. Fans of the genre will find lots of familiar material done well, and the vocal performance is impossible not to enjoy. Although greater diversity in the riffs, more dynamic instrumental performances, and a sleeker composition would have really helped the record shine, Hourswill still pay good tribute to the genre that I had spent far too long neglecting.
Recommended tracks: Unheilvoll, Not Enough
You may also like: Communic, Redemption, Cea Serin
Final verdict: 5.5/10
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Label: Ethereal Sound Works
Hourswill are:
– Leonel Silva (vocals)
– Tainan Reis (guitars)
– Pedro Burt (bass, keyboards)
– José Bonito (guitars, keyboards, vocals)
– Nuno Peixoto (drums)
With guests:
– Luís Simões (sitar, guitars, gong, tanpura)
– Fernando Matias (keyboards, samples, effects)
– Nuno Cruz (vocals)
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