This 4 piece prog band from Melbourne, Australia are releasing their debut full length album titled Iridescent. It’s 13 tracks long and while decent enough for a nice country drive it’s loaded with highlight moments for playlists!
Fans of the flare and musicality of prog/metal and rock bands will be right at home with the Terrestrials sound. The band plays with melodic lines and big soaring choruses just as much as they lean into bouncy grooves and djent territory. Where others on the spectrum of what we call prog would delve into odd time trickery and exercise their chops with extreme complexity, what I found immediately accessible about the band is how straight they play it. There’s highly competent players working together to play what the song needs, no one outshines the other and it feels very balanced between all the members.
One of my album highlights was the track ‘Canyons’ where the hook and urgency of the chorus is perfectly supported by the bands attack and energy when it’s required in contrast to the spaces left for vocalist Scott Alexander to belt out his emotive passages. It’s catchy without being obvious and I think this is the kind of aspect Terrestrials will be able to bank on for longevity. Songs have key moments that grab your attention and then they shift or move away from what ever it was until later in the song to return with full impact.
This especially apparent on ‘Hollow Hands’ with its clever lead guitar line that reappears throughout the song. The chorus is strong, the riffs are fun and it’s all well done, but this little lick just comes back in and out and kind of makes the track. It’s clever.
The band also throw in a few surprises. Whilst the majority of the material on Iridescent’ does tend to follow something of a familiar pattern, a track like ‘Into Minds’ starts out as one thing, completely ramps up mid way to become a really different beast and finds an ending that had me nodding my head with approval. Other track (which I wont spoil) will mislead you into thinking ‘oh this is the quiet track on the album’ only to straight up flip the table and go hard. Sometimes it’s a short lived eruption but a shake up none the less.
The track ‘Perennial Trials’ was launched with a video as the lead single for the album. Whilst I don’t deny it’s a strong song with moods and movements, it’s a little bit of an outlier song amongst this whole collection. As my first taste of the bands sound, it was a surprise to find much more commanding and memorable songs scattered throughout this whole album.
To close up, I encourage fans of the genre to give this more than a cursory skip through and stay a while. The gold is there wedged in between some occasionally meandering quieter parts and frustratingly short lived explosive slam dunk moments. For a first album, this is entirely acceptable and the band has clearly spent a lot of time crafting these songs to be the works they are now.
