It’s been nine months since the last installment of ProgTology. That’s partly due to James “Metal” Monteith touring the world with his excellent band, TesseracT, but also because we’re lazy. Either way, let’s talk about the significant goings on…

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Animals As Leaders
The Joy of Motion
Sumerian Records
25 March 2014

by David Keevill

Tosin Abasi is an interesting bloke. The eight-string guitarmanship is impressive, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. With his outfit Animals as Leaders, he’s turned what should be skilful but nerdy YouTube fodder into one of the most exciting and extroverted metal outfits to come out of the most recent wave of heavy progressive music.

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After The Burial
Wolves Within
Sumerian Records
17 December 2013

by Tomas Doyle

Here’s something I never understood about Djent: you learn to count when you’re in nursery school, so why is twanging away in one arbitrary number over some other arbitrary number considered more impressive than, say, being the milk monitor? The reason, you suspect, is that for virginal bedroom wankers everywhere, numbers represent a measurable and concrete thing. Each Djent-ist can see who is doing better than the rest because of what difficult integers they are crowbarring their riffs in to. You can’t argue with stats.

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Like any artform, music is not a competition. There is only good and bad music and that categorisation in itself is all down to subjective taste. However, in a bid for scientific rigour; some quantitative analysis to fortify the qualitative spiels, we’ve asked all the Thrash Hits contributors to list their favourite albums of 2013. Yeah, it’s here to boost our egos by claiming what we say is best and it’ll surely get some good clicks and you may (rightly) point out that it’s just another list but, at the very least, you might see an album that you’ve never heard of and think about buying it. That would be cool.

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TesseracT
Altered State
Century Media
27 May 2013

By Ruth Booth

When doom-mongers spoke of the world’s end in 2012, TesseracT may have felt a tiny bit paranoid. Their lauded debut One had seen them branded standard-bearers of UK Djent, but a cancelled major tour, and the departure of their second vocalist in 12 months left TesseracT struggling to tread water. That they reached the end of the year with both new album Altered State in the can and the New Blood Prog Award must have left them wondering if they were victims of some great cosmic joke.

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Having headlined the Roundhouse in October, Devin Townsend returns to London in this special one-off show with Meshuggah. It’s the Swedish djent masters’ first UK show since Hevy Festival last summer and tonight’s all set up to be a progressive metal showdown between two of the finest around at the moment. Let’s do this.

Pre-gig meal: Nando’s. Half chicken (medium) with corn, rice and halloumi.

6 things we learnt during Brixton’s prog metal masterclass…

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Earlier this week, the folks over in charge of Tech-Fest 2013 made their first line-up announcement – and they weren’t messing about. 25 bands, including all three major headline acts, were all covered in the first batch of names. That’s the kind of festival announcement we can get behind, and the kind that we’re making the subject of this week’s Sunday Spotify Slaylist.

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The Algorithm
Polymorphic Code
Basick Records
19 November 2012

by David Keevill

The sterile, self-enforced world of djent is becoming locked into a coma of its own creation, with a vast swathe of bands owing a soulless homage to the palm-muted riff. Yet waking like some Walter Tevis antihero into this drearily antiseptic world, a collection of bands have seen how barrages of arrhythmic but vacuous guitar parts can form part of a much more interesting whole.

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While we get a lot of funny things sent to us in the mail, we get a Hell of a lot stranger things sent to us by email. This column by Adam ‘Swanny’ Swan, bassist of Brit-djentsters, Monuments, on the disaffection of British music youth in the face of mass media music and tired, predictable 4/4 beats, is definitely one of the latter. That’s him second from the left up above. Yeah, him with the dreadlocks. The boy’s certainly got a lot on his mind….

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Okay, so this isn’t strictly a new column from James, but we did catch up with Mr Monteith backstage at this year’s Download Festival, where we cajoled him in front of our camera to talk about what really happened with regards to Elliot Coleman, to reminisce about that time he was sick all over Raz’s shoes, and to speculate on how much we’d have to pay him to get him to repeat his journo-vomiting technique over our contributor Tom Dare’s hair. 

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