Review: Cea Serin – The World Outside

Style: Traditional progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Dream Theater, Pain of Salvation, Evergrey, Symphony X
Country: United States (Louisiana)
Release date: 12 September 2025

Restraint and progressive metal—two concepts that have never collided. What do you mean my instrumental tangent has to be thematically relevant to the song I wrote, that whipping out the thesaurus does not actually make my lyrics more meaningful, or that forcefully skipping half a beat every three bars sounds like I’m avoiding 4/4 for the sake of it? That’s the entire point of the genre, dammit! Yeah, I hear you, and so have many bands over the years. Dream Theater is of course the genre’s poster child for glorious indulgence, but let me tell you now, fellow trad proggers Cea Serin bring it to a whole new level on latest release, The World Outside.

The World Outside is structured ambitiously with six tracks all surpassing the ten-minute mark. Though trad prog bands have been known to love their epics, seldom does a trad prog album consist of nothing but epics. This is for good reason: epics are emotionally taxing and multiple in a row quickly become too much of a good thing. After all, high points are only high points if low points exist as well—a good band knows how to provide emotional and sonic breathing space while still being engaging and keeping up momentum. You can include softer sections in an epic, but often the anticipation of a grand finish provides a certain intensity that ends up making those sections emotionally affecting anyway—hence the need for interludes and shorter, easily digestible songs. Yes, even Dream Theater included “Vacant” on Train of Thought to give some reprieve from the onslaught, and Ne Obliviscaris know when to dial back at least a little bit during their inscrutably titled interludes. 

Cea Serin don’t give a shit about any of this.

The World Outside, simply put, is like a seventy-minute-long prog orgasm. Admittedly, Cea Serin are not the most virtuosic band in the genre, but as my colleague Dave put it, they instead embody a certain compositional maximalism, prioritizing moment-to-moment catharsis over the need to have every idea immediately make sense within the greater whole. That’s not to say Cea Serin disregard structure completely—every song is still written around a chorus of some sort—but given that they average less than one stanza per minute¹, it’s safe to say their compositions are pretty loose. Riffs, proggy transitions, emotionally charged lead piano, warm waves of synths, charismatically belted vocal melodies, more guitar and keyboard solos (often in unison) than anyone could reasonably ask for—everything is fired at you in a relentless bid to keep your dopamine receptors firing like fireworks. And yet their core sound isn’t even that over the top. Imagine a band like Vanden Plas or Evergrey: moody, melodic, hook-driven, and an emphasis on emotions across the melancholic spectrum. The riffs are straightforward and crunchy, and the proggery is intricate yet always kept easily digestible. Now strip them of their compositional restraint, and you more or less get Cea Serin. To think all this madness is the product of just one dude (Jay Lamn) doing vocals, keys, rhythm guitar, and bass, and a drummer (Rory Fuciante), plus an army of hired assassins for the guitar solos!

Opener “Where None Shall Follow” is a brilliant illustration of everything Cea Serin do right. Lush, brooding synths envelop you with warmth and melancholy while pained, dramatic spoken word gradually introduces tension (and depression) that gets further amplified as heavy guitar chords enter the fray. Hefty bass notes rumble to the forefront like a starting pistol going off; after that, the song explodes with Lamn throwing one sick riff at you after another and Fuciante manically pounding away at his kit. A flurry of melodic shred lifts you into ascension and—wait, where did the harsh vocals come from? MY GOD that’s an amazing chorus, and it looks like we’re doing cowbell grooves now? Jesus fuck this lush synth solo is simply transcendent, and do you hear that fretless bass? Oh, so you’re telling me Lahm can croon like peak Daniel Gildenlow, too? Man, I give up. Ok, but how are these solos even fair? PIANO-GUITAR CALL AND RESPONSE? JUST TAKE MY SOUL ALREADY, IT’S YOURS. Ah, yes, the chorus, I remembered we had one of those! 

…where was I?

Much of The World Outside continues on like this. Cea Serin barrage you with one climactic moment after another—see, for example, the sudden Latin section in “The Rose on the Ruin”, or the dramatic synth work in the bridge of “Until the Dark Responds”. That, or virtually any riff out of Cea Serin’s inexhaustible arsenal of adrenaline-fueled neckbreakers, spidery prog riffs, and midtempo clunkers. Yet, for a large majority of the album’s duration, the band surprisingly manages to avoid listener fatigue. As intense and cathartic as The World Outside can be, at the end of the day Cea Serin is a highly melodic band that is not afraid to sit in midtempo for a while or to drop the riffage so that the synths, piano, or acoustic guitar can shine. And while the album technically contains no interludes, the piano plus synth sections with spoken word that open “Until the Dark Responds” and “All the Light That Shines” functionally might as well be interludes given how little each track ties back into them, so the album does give you some breathing space.

It is at this midway point, however, that some issues start to pop up. The reckless abandon in composition that makes Cea Serin so charming can also be their greatest enemy. Choruses the songs may have, but they often lack distinctive instrumental themes and motifs, causing The World Outside to blur a little in the middle. “All the Light That Shines” is a particularly loose composition in a place where either a ballad or a slow-burning epic with a very gradual crescendo structure would have been welcome. Instead, the song just riffs at a lower tempo and goes on a mesmerizing, yet structurally nonsensical instrumental tangent a la “The Ministry of Lost Souls” that even the godly release of tension at 11:03 can’t save from making the track overbearing and messy. To a lesser extent, “Until the Dark Responds” and closer “Wisdom of the Aging Fathers: Three Regards to Reason” (in the running for prog song title of the year, by the way) also suffer from this lack of care for their greater structure and individual identity. Adding to this blur are some light production issues. The cymbals are too loud and generally hissy, and the higher frequencies are overcrowded with vocals, guitars, synths, and said cymbals all regularly occupying a similar space in the mix. The resulting overall sound is much like a low-medium budget early 00s prog-power album: mostly clear and punchy, but with an abrasive edge that can become annoying in the long run. On the bright side though, “Where the Wretched and the Brave Align” is easily the tightest song on the album with solid theme development and a powerful chorus, thus salvaging much of the momentum lost in the middle. 

At its best, The World Outside is simply otherworldly and effortlessly rivals genre classics like Scenes from a Memory or The Mountain. Cea Serin can write mind-bogglingly good climaxes and know how to keep you engaged with their maelstrom of riffs, shred, and melody. At times it seems like they’re about to get away with their compositional recklessness, but at other times you pray for some respite as the zillionth guest guitar solo tears at your dopamine receptors and those cymbals are really too goddamn loud. By all reasonable means, The World Outside shouldn’t work: the record is too much, too much everything, and all too often, Cea Serin’s compositions don’t even make logical sense. But hey, neither did Dream Theater’s songs back in the day, and we still revere Images and Words as a genre staple, so maybe all isn’t so bad?

Recommended tracks: Where None Shall Follow, The Rose on the Ruin, Until the Dark Responds, When the Wretched and the Brave Align
You may also like: Triton Project, The Pulse Theory, Vanden Plas, Shadow Gallery, Koyaanisqatsy
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: Generation Prog Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Cea Serin is:
– Jay Lamm (vocals, keyboards, rhythm guitars, bass)
– Rory Faciane (drums, percussion)
With guests:
– Steffi Cannelli (guest vocals, track 2)
With guitar solos from:
– Andy Gillion
– João Miguel
– Coen Strouken
– Steve Blaze
– Vick LeCar
– Cecilia Cuccolini
– Manuel Acevedo
– and Dann Hoyos

1. I counted and found that each song has at most nine stanzas despite all being over ten minutes long. That’s about the same amount of lyrics as your average pop song. ↩︎