Riverside

Riverside are a progressive-rock band from Warsaw, Poland.

The band formed in 2001 when guitarist Piotr Grudziński met drummer Piotr Kozieradzki, both musicians in youth bands tied to heavy metal who shared a passion for progressive rock. By the end of the year, keyboardist Jacek Melnicki had also joined the line-up, and he in turn brought in singer and bassist Mariusz Duda.

With the line-up complete, the quartet recorded their first, self-titled demo, released on 15 March 2003. In October the band announced they had finished work on their debut album "Out Of Myself" (released that December). Around the same time, keyboardist Jacek Melnicki left for personal reasons and was replaced by Michał Łapaj.

After signing with Inside Out Music for distribution of their records in Europe and America, Riverside released "Second Life Syndrome" (2005) on the new label, a sophomore effort that picks up conceptually where their debut left off, continuing the story it had set in motion.

In the course of 2007 Riverside released their third studio album, "Rapid Eye Movement", the final chapter of what they called the "Reality Dream" trilogy. The following year the band undertook a tour celebrating the trilogy, culminating in a concert in Łódź, later immortalised on the live album inevitably titled "Reality Dream".

In January 2009 Riverside revealed they were working on their fourth album, "Anno Domini High Definition". The record was released on 15 June in Poland and four days later in the rest of the world, immediately proving a huge success, topping the Polish album chart, as did the accompanying tour, which saw them play across much of Europe between September and December for a total of over 40 dates.

On May 5, 2011, the EP "Memories in My Head" was released, made up of three tracks and intended to celebrate the band's first ten years of career. As explained by Duda, the release is a tribute to the group's earliest compositions, which were purely progressive in style.

On January 21, 2013, Riverside released their fifth album "Shrine Of New Generation Slaves". The record marked yet another shift for the band, moving away from the progressive metal sound of "Anno Domini High Definition" in favor of a more rock-oriented sound and more refined lyrics, favoring the song format (as the band itself underlined in choosing the title, whose acronym stands precisely for Songs). To promote the album, the band embarked on the "New Generation Tour", held across Europe and North America between May and November 2013.

On September 4, 2015, it was time for the sixth album, "Love, Fear and the Time Machine", which continued the band's melodic turn and is marked by sounds paying homage to the music of the Seventies and Eighties. It was followed by an extensive world tour that also saw Riverside perform at several festivals. One of these dates, the Tilburg show, was recorded and released two years later as the live album "Lost 'n' Found – Live in Tilburg".

The tour was meant to continue into the following year as well, but on February 21, 2016, guitarist Piotr Grudziński died of a sudden heart attack.

On September 23, 2016, the band announced they would carry on as a trio, choosing not to look for a new guitarist. A month later came "Eye Of The Soundscape", a collection of all the electronic instrumental tracks recorded between 2007 and 2015, plus four previously unreleased pieces, the last ones composed by the late Grudziński.

In 2017 Riverside went back on the road to honor the guitarist's memory with the "Towards The Blue Horizon Tour", joined on guitar by Maciej Meller, a longtime friend of Duda's.

On September 28, 2018, Riverside released their seventh studio album, "Wasteland". The nine tracks on the record marked a return to the progressive metal sound of the band's early years, though interwoven with the melodic elements typical of their more recent releases, with lyrics dealing with post-apocalyptic themes and, more indirectly, the band's state of mind following Grudziński's death.

Guitar duties were handled by Duda himself (who also played the solos on two tracks), Mateusz Owczarek, and session player Maciej Meller, once again confirmed by the band for the related tour.

The album was subsequently promoted with an extensive world tour that saw the band perform first in Europe between late 2018 and early 2019, and later in North America in May and June 2019. On December 1, 2020, the live album "Wasteland Tour 2018-2020" was released, containing audio of all the tracks performed during the tour along with video footage of the 2018 show in Oberhausen.

On February 1, 2020, Riverside announced that Meller had become an official member of the lineup, restoring the band to a quartet.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Riverside were forced to cancel the remaining dates of the "Wasteland Tour". This allowed the band's various members to focus on other projects. The first was Duda, who in March 2020 released his debut single "The Song Of A Dying Memory" as part of a series of "subcutaneous tracks" or "adherent tracks", marked by softer sounds and vocals; in August he released the second single in the series, "Are You Ready For The Sun". In 2020 Duda also released the excellent "Through Shaded Woods" under the moniker Lunatic Soul, his stable project running parallel to Riverside, as well as "Lockdown Spaces", released simply under his own name. The latter, created during the recording sessions for "Through Shaded Woods", marked the beginning of the "Lockdown Trilogy", a series of electronic music albums that also includes "Claustrophobic Universe" and "Interior Drawings", both released during 2021.

In June 2020, Łapaj presented the single "Breathe", followed in November by the EP "Sessions"; in July 2021 he then released his debut album "Are You There". On September 18, 2020, Meller released his album "Zenith", marked by a prog-rock sound.

In the summer of 2021 the band embarked on a brief four-date tour to celebrate their twentieth anniversary, during which they performed, for the first time, the previously unreleased "Story Of My Dream", the first recording made with Meller as an official member. The track was released as a single on October 27 of that year and served as a preview for the compilation "Riverside 20 – The Shorts & The Longs", made available on the following November 19 and featuring a selection of over thirty tracks drawn from their catalog. Between April and May 2022 the "Riverside 20" tour also reached the Americas, first passing through the United States and then Mexico, Chile and Brazil, before moving to Europe in September.

During the spring of 2022, Riverside revealed they had begun writing new material for an eighth studio album, due out in January 2023. The recording sessions, spanning roughly three months (specifically between June 7 and August 30), began at Boogie Town Studio in Otwock: this was the first time since "Anno Domini High Definition" that the band had chosen to start sessions somewhere other than Serakos Studio in Warsaw. In mid-August, during the final week of mixing, Duda revealed that the record would feature seven tracks (plus two instrumentals for the special edition) and that the lyrics would largely deal with current, topical themes.

On October 21, both the album's title, "ID.Entity", and its release date, set for January 20, 2023, were revealed; at the same time, the first single, "I'm Done With You", was released along with its video. As further previews, the singles "Self-Aware" (November 29, 2022) and "Friend or Foe?" (January 10, 2023) were also released, both in edited versions shorter than those featured on the album.