Playlists

New prog. Raise your hand if, faced with this term, you don't immediately think of the shimmering, thoroughly Eighties sound of Marillion, IQ, Pallas, Twelfth Night. I understand. It happens to me too. Of the entire trajectory of prog revival after the Seventies, we tend to remember mainly that brief, isolated flare-up, in which four seemingly out-of-time bands managed to break into the British charts with an updated, instantly recognisable version of the Genesis/Camel/Pink Floyd sound.

But what if I told you that this brief parenthesis, the so-called neoprog movement, isn't representative of the genre's fortunes in the decades that followed? That the reason hundreds of progressive albums harking back to the Seventies are still released every single year lies in a different turning point altogether?

Outside fan circles, little has been written about this "Nineties renaissance." And yet the dynamics that have shaped the genre over the last twenty or thirty years owe far more to the boom in releases for enthusiasts recorded in the Nineties than to the brief mainstream breakthrough of Marillion and their peers.

The resurgence of symphonic prog has its own specific causes and characteristics. Among the first: the advent of the compact disc and the wave of reissues that brought classic albums back into circulation for old and new devotees alike. Then came the drop in recording and release costs, and the rise of new labels dedicated to the genre (Mellotronen, Mellow, Musea, InsideOut…). Finally, the internet gave rise to transnational communities of fans, far more effective than postal fanzines at building an alternative information network to a music press that had been hostile to the genre since at least the mid-Seventies.

The main musical distinction lies in a considerable broadening of horizons compared to the Eighties neo-progressive sound: some acts continue to draw mainly on the early symphonic "greats" (increasingly folding in Jethro Tull, Yes, King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant among their influences), but other references are far from uncommon. The prog-folk of Gryphon and Comus, the dark-tinged hard prog of Atomic Rooster and Black Widow, or artists from the national scenes that had defined the Seventies. Even the degree of "fidelity" to the originals varies widely: there are bands that nimbly hop between near-facsimiles of Yes, King Crimson and Gentle Giant (see Flower Kings), and bands that forge entirely original styles, for which finding historical parallels isn't easy. Examples include the Mellotron-drenched heavy prog of Anekdoten, the synthetic chamber rock of After Crying, the ambient sound of Sezhon Dozhdei, the evocative dark-post of Areknamés, or the Anatolian instrumental prog of İhtiyaç Molası.

One could also discuss geography, noting how the new revivalist wave involves artists scattered across the most varied locations: British, American, Italian, Swedish and Norwegian contributions all matter, but the map also includes Hungarian projects (After Crying), Japanese (Motoi Sakuraba), Russian (Sezhon Dozhdei), Indonesian (Discus), and Turkish (İhtiyaç Molası) ones. Some local scenes correspond to recognisable stylistic choices: among the most obvious, the folk-tinged heavy prog widespread in the "Scandinavian renaissance" (alongside a passion for vintage instruments like Mellotron, Hammond and Clavinet), and Italy's return to the Banco/Pfm/Orme school.

The playlist proposed here spans thirty tracks, organized roughly by stylistic and geographic groupings. Alongside artists who debuted in the Nineties, we've also included more recent offerings, to show the later outgrowths of the "continuities" born in that period. Where possible, we chose to focus on shorter pieces, and to concentrate exclusively on the symphonic sound. The Nineties also saw the flourishing of prog-metal à la Dream Theater, the post-prog of Archive and No-Man, the brutal prog of Ruins and associated acts. And then the arrival of the widely acclaimed Porcupine Tree and the development of the first progressive strains within post-rock and post-hardcore: all factors that gradually brought the number of progressive rock releases, by the end of the millennium, back up to the levels of the Seventies peak (before doubling it some twenty years later). Some of these strands have already been explored on OndaRock in dedicated features; for others, we'll just have to wait! 

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30/12/2025