Hot off the press today – the record releases tomorrow – and joining the prodigious list of young bands we love to feature, Manchester’s Prognosis are streaming their exciting debut with us here at The Heaviest Blog. Arriving armed with comparisons to metal heavyweights like Mastodon, Gojira, and Death could be too much hype firepower for a new act to shoulder. Not the case here. Progressive metal should be exciting and fresh and take on new ideas to build on the blocks laid by such acts. Definition is both wildly exciting and funky fresh. Don’t just take my word for it. Over the jump with ye.
Progressive metal gets a hard time from me around these parts, mainly because my attention span doesn’t hang around long enough for most progressive ideas to extrapolate themselves. Definition is the type of record to open weary eyes to some metal that genuinely just rocks. Or slays. Whichever goofy metal go-to you want. Point being, Prognosis do their thing with swinging grooves and lyrics that exist as individual stories; a selection of short stories based on these tracks will follow the record in the near future. Riffs and rhythmic tinkering are big parts of the wholly ‘metal’ metal that Prognosis unleash on their debut. The whole band gets in on the action from the first notes of “High Road” through the generously hook-laden runtime, culminating in a rager with “Drones”.
Groove centric and unaccompanied by bells’n’whistles (outside of some crafty uses of handheld percussion), Definition is laden with jams cooked up in the practice room and played with honest-to-goodness love. You can tell. Without reinventing the wheel, this is a debut that tinkers with a bunch of metal quirks and styles. Fans of metal, in general, will hear something that pulls them back to the ‘classic’ metal of their youth. Yes, bands we loved as kids are now being considered classic, folks. It’s scary.
Prognosis release Definition on the 21st, available here. The band then jump on a short tour of the UK, details of which you can and should find on Facebook.