“Take my picture. Decomposing.”
One of prog metal’s shining lights is back. Six years after the career-defining Palimpsest, Protest the Hero have finally shown their faces again, and added another triumphant record to their near-perfect catalogue. Within is a beacon of a band that doesn’t know how to take their foot off the gas, a selection of songs that perfectly balance directness with endless theatrics and absurd technicality.
Everything Protest The Hero are known for is here in spades, crammed in with new sounds and ideas across an extremely compact 37 minutes. Album opener “Mouthpiece” sets the tone – a winding, geometric tech metal song draped over a post-hardcore skeleton. It’s the closest to a classic Protest The Hero song that Within has to offer, a perfect distillation of the incessant shred, punk energy, and left-wing politics that make up Protest’s identity as a band.
Politics are peppered throughout the album, with vocalist Rody Walker’s lyrics going far beyond the platitudes and slogans that lesser lyricists would be happy to fill their lyric sheets with. “Fishhook” is the best example of this, a surprisingly optimistic rager about wanting to bridge the partisan divide, despite Rody’s distaste for the misinformed people he finds himself trying to find common ground with. The lyrics, thankfully, go a layer deeper than wanting us all to get along, marrying this wish for common ground with an understanding that capitulating to right-wing ideas would put vulnerable members of society at risk. The song title itself is likely a reference to the famous Fishhook theory, the idea that watering down left-wing politics to meet centrist ideals will empower the far-right. It’s impossible to divorce Protest the Hero from their politics, and it’s a welcome relief to see that the band’s nuanced, empathetic lyrics show no signs of disappearing any time soon.
While “Within” holds tight to the core tenets of Protest the Hero’s sound, just about everything else is a step into new territory. “Grandfather’s Axe” has a rock’n’roll swagger about it, marrying a stompy, brash foundation with as many odd rhythms and shreddy cutaways as possible. “Orchard” is the band’s most optimistic song, surpassing even “Mist” and “Rivet“. Following it is “Liberty Spike“, the band’s darkest song since 2005’s Kezia, with the most personal set of lyrics Rody has penned since taking over lyric duties from ex-bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi. Reflections on a lost loved one and a goodbye that never happened are underpinned by an evolution of Protest The Hero’s modern sound that feels both surprising and inevitable.
Closer “The Mariner” takes everything that makes Within great to its logical conclusion. The band are more daring, more progressive, more emotionally raw. Everything that has made Protest The Hero so enduring is shown off and built on. Each musician puts in a career-defining performance on an eight-minute track that feels designed to make long-time Protest fans shed tears.
Despite its startlingly short runtime, Within feels like a complete work. The evolution in Protest’s sound that it represents feels inevitable, delightful, and revelatory. Over twenty years since they burst on the scene with 2005’s Kezia, Protest the Hero prove yet again that they deserve their spot as one of progressive metal’s most essential bands.
