Is it weird to look back at an album as a stop-gap release? Although not anywhere close to a filler record, British progressive metal band Tesseract’s Polaris , the first album after reuniting with original vocalist Daniel Tompkins, was a bit of a hit and miss. It felt like the band were celebrating that Tompkins was back in the fold, because it would be difficult to top their previous album Altered State , which featured Ashe O’Hara on vocals.
With their latest album Sonder , however, it looks like the band has realised they've got work to do. And boy, do they deliver. For any hardcore fan, the aggressive edge to the band cuts even deeper on songs like the thundering opener ‘Luminary’, and even the ones who found Tesseract as part of the multitudinous djent and modern metal circuit about a decade ago will hear real growth.
One of their strongest compositions comes in early, the atmospheric but rough riffs meeting Tompkins’ shrieks and chilling warning on ‘King’ - “You'd kill to find me/ But the crown above my head is deadly”. In these times of heavy handed governments around the globe, this song resonates impeccably. It might be their shortest album yet (at about 37 minutes), but Sonder packs it all in. It's dreamy and cinematic on ‘Orbital’, delightfully intricate and complex on the rhythm-led ‘Juno’ and slamming on a signature mix of heavy and light on ‘Beneath My Skin/Mirror Image’.
It's more on this album that we can hear adventurousness and experimentation, honing in on a sonic language that fits right over their emotive concept of connectivity in the digital age, and a broader look at everyone around us. They are menacingly groovy on ‘Smile’, which receives new treatment compared to when it was released it as the first single in June last year. It proves that Tompkins, who was part of Indian prog band Skyharbor, is still one of the best voices in prog - crooning, crying and screaming, he can do it all.
They close with ‘The Arrow’, a remorseful point of the finger to perhaps anyone responsible for conflict. Sonder plays to Tesseract’s strengths of being reliable mind-bending metallers but also pushes them a little further ahead, to wander and look at life around them.
