What is this place?
Did you ever feel like browsing through Bandcamp’s new releases page, but felt daunted by all the bedroom projects clogging the page with unfinished demos? Or have you ever felt inclined to scour Metal-Archives’ advanced search function, but didn’t feel like checking each and every single one of them in hope there’s something that’s maybe decent? Well, we do that work for you. We dig through the depths of the internet in search of interesting underground progressive metal bands. We use a liberal interpretation of “progressive metal,” so we also write about similarly experimental and/or adventurous genres like avant-garde, post-metal, progressive rock, mathcore, or whatever else strikes our writers’ fancy. The metric we use for “underground” is a listener cap of 20k monthly listeners on Spotify. The nice thing about our approach is that unlike a normal publication, we are not bound by promos, but we can review everything we feel like, as long as it is under our listener cap.
If you want to get your band reviewed or want to send us a suggestion, take a look at the Contact page.
History
Once upon a time our boss Sam thought it was strange how there was so little modern technical/progressive thrash metal of any good quality released. All the major albums seemingly had been released in a time span of 5 years around 1990 (with some outliers). Nothing against those bands – Heathen and Mekong Delta are still some of my favorites – but surely such a great subgenre did not just… die, right? Since no one on r/Metal could help me either, I went to search on my own. Being the blockhead that I am, I thought it’d be a great idea to just search for all “Progressive/Thrash” releases in the last 10 years on Metal-Archives. One of them had to be good right? As the amount of releases in this genre was actually very small and I discarded everything without a review, I quickly stumbled upon multiple great bands: Cautiva and Gargoyle (the Japanese one) most notably. From there on the habit of doing random Metal-Archives searches rooted itself in my system. Though it didn’t immediately yield any further results, I kept doing it occasionally.
A year or so passed and I got on the r/progmetal discord server. I’d sort of report on my findings in the chat there. After the third time of flooding the recommendation channels with obscure bands, someone suggested me to write about my findings on r/progmetal. Nothing big, just a couple of notes on the bands you found is fine. I liked the idea so I rolled with it. It was June 2018 then. Since I wanted to cover the whole year I first wanted to make a post of some highlights of the first half year, but boy that did not age well. I ended up with about 9 albums for January alone so I figured it’d be better go on a month-by-month basis.
So from there on a series was born. I covered the first six months of the year in about half the time until working myself into a burn-out. Instead of quitting the series then I put up an application and found two people who helped me reviewing. As the reviews were getting longer and the series more serious, more people from the Discord told me I should get a website for this instead of posting it to Reddit. And thus came about this website. Since then we’ve had various staff and format changes. We went from monthly editions to weekly editions to just regular old individual reviews, and our writing went from amateurish to the relatively high standard we have today. At this point, it’s practically a serious publication.