THE WAR WITHIN
“We finally feel like we’ve reached that peak TesseracT sound,” declares Daniel Tompkins. As leading lights of the British prog metal scene, TesseracT return with an album that’s equal parts introspection and unfettered ambition. So is War Of Being their most progressive work yet? Bassist Amos Williams and vocalist Tompkins tell Prog about the grand concepts behind it.
Words: David West
TesseracT: big concepts and even bigger riffs.
Images: Andy Ford
When your band haven’t released a studio album for five years, it feels like a very bold statement to return with an 11-minute prog metal epic. If that wasn’t sufficiently daring, TesseracT’s War Of Being – the title track from their upcoming album – is accompanied by a high-concept video in which the idea of inner struggle is expressed through a futuristic samurai battling their doppelgänger. It’s nothing if not a gamble. “Every band must have those discussions: what’s going to be the most successful song to release first?” says frontman Daniel Tompkins. “The last album [2018’s Sonder] was relatively short for us. I felt like I’d seen enough feedback to know people were left a little bit dissatisfied, so I thought it would be a real unexpected thing to release an 11-minute track as the first single. Rather than releasing a song that’s just going to appeal to a wider audience, we wanted to honour the core fanbase that has stuck by us for the past 15 or so years.
“We don’t sit down and write a pop song, we slowly craft a track. It takes hours and hours to get a small section down.”
Amos Williams
For me, this is really a song for the fans.”