Welcome to the top half of The Elite Extremophile’s Top Prog Albums of 2025. Part One can be found here.
Continue reading “Best of 2025: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 2: 25-1”Best of 2025: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 2: 25-1
Tag: chicago
Best of 2025: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 1: 50-26
Welcome to The Elite Extremophile’s Top Prog Albums of 2025! As usual, this is a two-part list of 50 total entries. Part two is here.
As a reminder, the music on this list spans December 2024 through November 2025. Music from December 2025 will be on the 2026 list. I’m sure there is plenty of good music I missed, but when it comes to the reviewing, this is a one-man operation. (My proofreaders/editors, Kelci and Dan, have been very helpful, as always.) There are also certain trends and styles I simply don’t like very much.
2025 was a fantastic year for progressive rock and related genres. I was spoiled for choice with this list, and this may be the overall-strongest batch of recommendations I’ve given to date.
Continue reading “Best of 2025: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 1: 50-26”Odds & Ends: December 29, 2025
Band: Doom Gong | Album: Megagong | Genre: Psychedelic rock | Bandcamp
Doom Gong’s latest record is by turns exhilarating and idyllic. The band nimbly alternates between speedy instrumental antics and moments of lush abstraction. In general, the tempo is upbeat, and the easiest stylistic comparison here would be King Gizzard. These guys have a bit more fuzz to them, often channeling Ty Segall and Ty Segall-adjacent acts, like Wand or Fuzz. The sound is maximal, often bordering on suffocating, but Doom Gong makes it work.
Score: 82/100
Band: Eyes Twitch | Album: … | Genre: Progressive metal | Bandcamp
The debut record from this instrumental duo is an engaging excursion. Riffs are speedy and complex, and song structures are often surprising. The synth inclusions are a lot of fun, and the band demonstrates a good knack for knowing when to take their foot off the gas for a moment.
Score: 80/100
Continue reading “Odds & Ends: December 29, 2025”Odds & Ends: December 4, 2025
Artist: William Covert | Album: Dream Vessel | Genre: Post-rock, Drone | Bandcamp
Drone is a genre that I largely dislike but do occasionally dabble in. When I run across a drone artist that I do enjoy, it’s usually because they’ve melded those influences with something else. With Neptunian Maximalism, they married drone with heavy, experimental metal. And with William Covert, he has blended it with post-rock and avant-garde jazz. Textures are wide and airy, but it’s not just aimless ambience. Drumming helps give this record a sense of direction, and there are clear structures and throughlines in the individual compositions. The music is spooky, spacy, and artful.
Score: 73/100
Band: Cratophane | Album: Exode | Genre: Progressive rock, Post-metal | Bandcamp
Cratophane’s sophomore album sees this self-described “angular rock” band take a lot of stoner and doom metal influences into their music. There are still jagged riffs and irregular rhythms aplenty, but the band also slows down significantly for extended periods of time. Magma’s influence looms large here, but so does that of bands like Pelican. This is a dark, moody, and semi-psychedelic record that goes to some interesting places. As with many instrumental records, I feel a number of the songs are longer than they need to be, but it’s not too bad.
Score: 76/100
Continue reading “Odds & Ends: December 4, 2025”Odds & Ends: October 6, 2025
Band: Cheer-Accident | Album: Admission | Genre: Avant-prog, Progressive pop | Bandcamp
Super-prolific Chicagoans Cheer-Accident are back with their 26th full-length release. This album has a more electronic feel than most of their releases. It’s still rooted in oddball, angular progressive rock, but the synths help smooth out some edges. Coupled with some smart and infectious melodies, I would rank this as among the band’s best. (At least of the half-dozen or so of their albums I’ve heard.)
Score: 81/100
Band: Eden Lantsêm | Album: My Guts Rest upon Your Lips Like the Breath of Forgotten Lovers | Genre: Zeuhl, Progressive metal | Bandcamp
The latest solo project from Swiss multi-instrumentalist Tim Nyss sees him exploring the world of zeuhl with an especially heavy twist. The four long instrumental cuts on this release lurch and thunder with the power of sludge metal, but it’s all in service of Magmatic oddness. Rhythms vary between martial and irregular-but-urgent, and avant-garde chords slash and slam across this record. This is a harsh, heavy release and is one of the few successful meldings of zeuhl with metal that I’ve run across.
Score: 79/100
Continue reading “Odds & Ends: October 6, 2025”Odds & Ends: September 1, 2025
Band: Jordsjø & Breidablik | Album: Kontraster | Genre: Progressive rock, Progressive folk, Krautrock | Bandcamp
Norwegian bands Jordsjø and Breidablik team up on this album to each deliver one epic apiece, fittingly titled “Kontraster” (“Contrasts”). Jordsjø’s composition is some of their best music in a long time, featuring a thrilling mix of classic prog that filters the influences of Genesis and King Crimson through their Norse folk-tinged lens. This work is balanced against many pretty acoustic moments that feel like they’re rooted in scenic fjords, but still with a foot in the modern prog-rock movement. Breidablik’s offering is much more electronic. Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, and other early prog-electronic acts are their obvious inspiration. Hints of their homeland still peek through, though. Airy flutes and twinkling guitars shine against the backing of looping synths.
Score: 91/100
Band: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard | Album: Phantom Island | Genre: Progressive pop | Bandcamp
King Gizzard’s latest album is a bit borderline for this site, but I enjoyed it overall. On this release, the band has incorporated a full orchestra into their music, and it’s a successful experiment. The lush soundscapes complement and elevate the band’s smart, Southern-inflected art rock, and it pushes the album from “fine” to “pretty good.” Their previous record didn’t really resonate with me; this is in a similar vein, but the freshness of all the strings and winds helps the band better realize their ideas.
Score: 78/100
Continue reading “Odds & Ends: September 1, 2025”Album Review: Fer de Lance – Fires on the Mountainside
Band: Fer de Lance | Album: Fires on the Mountainside | Genre: Progressive metal, Power metal | Year: 2025
From: Chicago, USA | Label: Cruz del Sur Music
For fans of: Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, Wytch Hazel, Rainbow
Power metal and classic heavy metal are styles of music that show up on my site every now and then, but never with a ton of frequency. Fer de Lance is a Chicagoan quartet that uses those genres as the basis for some very big, very epic-sounding metal. They pull in influences from farther afield, too, including various veins of folk music and black metal.
Continue reading “Album Review: Fer de Lance – Fires on the Mountainside”Album Review: Snooze – I Know How You Will Die
Band: Snooze | Album: I Know How You Will Die | Genre: Math rock, Progressive metal | Year: 2025
From: Chicago, USA | Label: Choke Artist
For fans of: Between the Buried and Me, Tera Melos, And So I Watch You From Afar, Emberside
I’ve been pretty open about my general distaste for subgenres that end in “-core.” And that goes double for most things classifiable as djent. So, had I not had this album specifically recommended to me, I probably would have skipped it had I found it on my own on Bandcamp. “Mathcore” and “djent” are usually good signs I’ll find a record tedious and repetitious. There are outliers, of course, but I do do some prioritization of stuff to listen to in looking for records for this site.
I am very happy I had this album recommended to me. Snooze is a Chicago-based quartet that plays a pretty heavy variety of math rock. I Know How You Will Die is their third full-length release and their first in six years. It’s also their heaviest by a significant margin. The band’s roots in math rock and Midwest emo are evident, especially in the vocal lines, but everything comes together in an incredibly satisfying way.
Continue reading “Album Review: Snooze – I Know How You Will Die”Best of 2023: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 2: 25-1
Welcome to part two of The Elite Extremophile’s Top 50 Prog Albums of 2023. Part one can be found here. Now, let’s get back to it!
Continue reading “Best of 2023: Top 50 Prog Albums Part 2: 25-1”Album Review: Fleshvessel – Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed
Band: Fleshvessel | Album: Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed | Genre: Avant-garde metal | Year: 2023
From: Chicago, USA | Label: I, Voidhanger Records
For fans of: Oranssi Pazuzu, Panopticon, Panegyrist
Sometimes I run across albums with artwork that does not seem to fit the music. Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed, the first full-length album from Chicago-based Fleshvessel, doesn’t quite gobsmack me, but it’s not really what I was anticipating. Twisting trees made of arms and chasms lined by teeth led me to expect a gruesome onslaught of relentless death or black metal. But instead, this band has put out an impressively diverse, cohesive, and thoughtful record. Yes, there’s no shortage of harsh metal here, but there’s so much more.
Continue reading “Album Review: Fleshvessel – Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed”
The Elite Extremophile 