Protest The Hero have revealed the details of their new album, their first release in six years.
Titled ‘Within’, it will be released on July 17. It serves as the follow-up to 2020’s ‘Palimpsest’.
The band had this to say about what the record represents for them:
“Most people are pretty familiar with hermetic maxim “as above so below” but the entire passage isn’t quite as well known. ‘As above so below, as within so without, as the universe so the soul’. Obviously I focused on the middle portion of the quote. “Within” represents the individual inner world, which is largely defined by our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. The songs are all representative of how external factors affect our inner world.With that being said it’s probably the most personal stuff we’ve ever released.”
The artwork looks like this:
Whilst the tracklisting is a bit more like this:
1. Mouthpiece
2. Fishhook
3. i. above
4. Grandfather’s Axe
5. The Orchard
6. ii. below
7. Liberty Spike
8. The Mariner
The band have also shared the album’s opening track, and what a beauty it is. A spiralling, shimmering, sensationally constructed mesh of progressive riffs, guttural barks and gorgeous crescendos, it is everything that is incredible about the band, but enhanced to a new shiny level. Complex, daring and, more than anything, brilliantly fun, it’s also a pleasure to hear that they still have it in them push to the boundaries.
Vocalist Rody Walker had this to say about it:
“On the record focused on the micro, Mouthpiece is the only song from a macro perspective. This is not without reason. It is about the controlling powers that have convinced us that everything needs to be divided into binaries despite the fact that very few things truly exist within them. It describes a world of brilliant colour reduced to black and white by charlatans like podcasters and corporate media. It suggests the only true binary we should pay attention to is the very wealthy and everyone else.”
