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 site 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 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. However, we also cover “overground” bands that are within the remit of the blog.

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, he went to search on his own. Being the blockhead that he is, he 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, he quickly stumbled upon multiple great bands, like Cautiva and Gargoyle (JP). From there on, the habit of doing random Metal-Archives searches rooted itself in Sam’s system.

A year or so passed and Sam got on the r/progmetal discord server. After the third time of flooding the recommendation channels with obscure bands, someone suggested that he write about his findings on r/progmetal. So from there on, a series was born. Sam covered the first six months of the year in about half the time until working himself into a burn-out. Instead of quitting the series then, he put up an application and found two people who helped with reviewing. As the reviews were getting longer and the series more serious, more people from the Discord suggested a website 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!