Review: Sindar – Tower of the Sun

Style: Death metal, progressive metal, dark folk (Mixed Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Numenorean, Devin Townsend, Green Carnation
Country: Utah, United States
Release date: 26 September 2025

When I started writing for The Progressive Subway, I already felt tapped into the underground to a significant degree. But the thing with the underground is that there is always a tunnel or fissure you’ve yet to explore. In our promo heap, I’ve been surprised to discover a handful of gems from my own backyard. Salt Lake City is a Mecca of sorts for a handful of groups: mormons, mountaineers, and motorsport maniacs. But metalheads? Not so much. So when I see Utah listed as an artist’s home base, I perk up. Sindar had my attention for that reason alone, but when our self-proclaimed “Label Liaison” Christopher described their sophomore effort Tower of the Sun as “well-made Opeth worship”? Yoink.

Maybe it’s something in the increasingly salty lake we live next to, or maybe it’s all the smog that gets trapped in the valleys here, but Utah seems oddly fertile ground for worship acts of bands I hold dear. Salt Lake City’s Caladan Brood¹ glorify my favorite black metal band Summoning like no other group can. Provo’s Carian distill adoration for my favorite progressive instrumetalists Cloudkicker and Scale the Summit in equal measure. And now come Sindar, who appear to pray night and day to Sweden’s premier purveyors of prog-death—one of the heads on my Metal Mt. Rushmore.

From the get-go through the closing notes of Tower of the Sun, Sindar channel almost every era of their heroes through their instrumentation and vocals. Acoustic passages amongst the death metal, the push-and-pull between cavernous growls and a dark clean tenor, ghostly guitar melodies wrapped in spectral keyboards and flutes—Sindar have brought the whole toolkit with them. Take “Anor (Tower of the Sun),” for example. The chordy, skip-hopping main riff and eerie lead line wouldn’t sound out of place on My Arms, Your Hearse or Still Life. Prefer the more controversial 2010s output? “The Ranger” features chuggy riffs punctuated by proggy noodling to scratch that itch, with stringy synths and stacked clean harmonies pushing the effect further. And for those of us with the highest standards who revere the Swedes’ 2000s material as not just their own peak, but some of the best metal ever written, there’s plenty of satisfaction to be found here in songs like “Eclipse” and “Field of the Dead.” The crushing, twisting, and labyrinthine riffs give way to haunting clean melodies which provide that sense of a lurking menace in the ether—just like those seminal Opeth albums.

All that said, I would be doing Sindar a disservice by reducing Tower of the Sun solely to Opethian homage, as other musical flavors are at play here. “Greenfields,” a longing folk tune, is my favorite song on the album. Like slow breathing, the vocal lines climb and fall, lingering just long enough to ache before pulling back—a yearning etched in sound. “Black Moth” is a shoegazy track that expands Tower of the Sun’s palette even further; Its outro in particular is fantastically emotive, swelling into a haze of sound that is both cathartic and stirring. The chords become thicker, the vocals more forceful, and the melody shifts into something that gives me wanderlust. The lyrics only add to this feeling: “Castles in the sand / Almighty hands / Starlight-touched air / Take me there” they beckon, inviting you to reach for something mystical, yet beyond reach.

Within the reverent prog-death framework you’ll find occasional stylistic detours—like the mini thrash section in “Field of the Dead” or the black metal fire that shows up in “Inheritance.” Unfortunately, these brief moments tend to sound out of place with what surrounds them, and come off as awkwardly placed sketches that transition rather abruptly rather than fully formed ideas. I can’t discern whether I dislike these tidbits simply because I’m not expecting them within the context of a sound so clearly patterned after Stockholm’s finest, or if they truly don’t belong. Either way, some of them could be trimmed or eliminated altogether.

Utah is a strange place. And it knows that it’s strange. We don’t set trends; we chase them.² For that reason, culture here always seems to be playing catch-up to other parts of the country.³ Are the worship acts here emblematic of this? Maybe. I can’t help but tie the two observations together. I’m often worshipping right alongside these artists, anyways, so I don’t really mind. I’m glad to have Sindar and Tower of the Sun in the pews with me. In a scene that feels comparatively barren in Utah’s mountainous desert, finding a band so dedicated to a specific sound that I’ve always loved feels like stumbling across an oasis. If chasing trends means we occasionally catch echoes of greatness, I’ll take it.

Recommended tracks: Greenfields, Anor (Tower of the Sun), Nightingale, Inheritance
You may also like: Sisare, The Reticent, Marigubre, Citadel, Piah Mater
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Belegg Records

Sindar is:
– Christian Lucy (guitars, keyboards, vocals)
– Kona Ossana (drums, bass, guitars, vocals)
With guests:
– Adrien Baldwin (guitar)
– Sarah Hakes (vocals)
– Derek Harman (vocals)
– Serena Palo (vocals)
– Austin Wheeler (vocals)

1. Fronted by Visigoth’s Jake Rogers, who also fronts an Agalloch worship act called Gallowbraid. ↩︎
2. Are you old enough to remember when flash mobs started going viral? They started popping up on my college campus a year after everyone else got sick of them. ↩︎
3. The conservative world religion headquartered here doesn’t help this fact, either. ↩︎