LEPROUS
A return to prog metal? Not quite, but Norway’s kings of the epic ditch the excess baggage on album number eight.
Words: Paul Travers Illustration: Matt Holland
Edited by Dave Everley prog.reviews@futurenet.com
‘I’m done pleasing the crowds,’ croons Leprous frontman and chief songwriter Einar Solberg on Silently Walking Home, the opening track on Melodies Of Atonement. Which is surprising as it wasn’t apparent that he had been. Even in progressive circles there are those who would prefer a band to carry out variations on a theme for the rest of their career and there are plenty who yearn for a return to Leprous’s earlier work – pre-2017’s Malina, essentially – when they could still be accurately described as a prog metal band.
Solberg’s pre-release chatter around this album will be music to those people’s ears. It’s being trumpeted as the heaviest thing they’ve made in some time. At the same time, like some of his peers – Riverside’s Mariusz Duda among them – the Leprous man seems to push back against the ‘p’ word these days. “I’m not sure it’s very prog,” he says of the record. It sounds like an attempt at distancing the band from the scene that’s supported them, ignoring the fact that the engine which drives most modern prog is experimentation and a desire to carve out new sonic paths rather than week-long solos and capes.