progressive

Caligula’s Horse, hailing from Brisbane, Australia, are a leading light in contemporary progressive metal. Their colourful and emotional music, spanning influences as diverse as King Crimson, Steely Dan, Opeth, and Jeff Buckley, has forged a deep and lasting connection with fans across the globe.

Caligula’s Horse have taken ambitious strides with every release, maintaining a course of continual artistic development and reinvention. Formed in 2011, the band garnered critical acclaim for their eclectic and exploratory debut, Moments from Ephemeral City (2011), and its dark, conceptual follow-up, The Tide, the Thief & River’s End (2013). But Caligula’s Horse truly made their mark worldwide with their vibrant and hard-hitting third album, Bloom (2015), the first on prestigious German record label, Inside Out. It was on the back of this record that the group expanded its touring regime beyond Australia, including shows with the likes of Mastodon, Opeth, the Dillinger Escape Plan, Tesseract, and Anathema. Caligula’s Horse’s fourth album, In Contact (2017), with its grand concept and expansive dynamics, was the first to break the Australian ARIA Top 50 Chart. Its critical and commercial success saw the band grow its reach tremendously, packing out venues across Australia, the UK, and Europe, and touring the Americas for the first time.

In 2020, Caligula’s Horse released their most focussed and potent artistic statement yet: Rise Radiant, an uncompromising exploration of the human experience dressed in vivid musical colour and virtuosic performances. It was the culmination of the band’s artistic development, concentrating the expressive stylings which have endeared Caligula’s Horse to legions of fans worldwide. But it is also far more. Rise Radiant is the Caligula’s Horse sound pushed to its extremes: at once its most ferocious and its most touching, its most expansive and its most condensed, its most poetic and its most vicious. Rise Radiant is an anthem for the regeneration of self-belief, an exploration of the themes of legacy, and a rallying cry for survival.

With the release of Rise Radiant, Caligula’s Horse celebrated their highest international chart positions yet, highlighted with #23 on Australia’s ARIA Albums Chart, and #43 on the German Albums Chart, plus #5 UK Rock Albums and #10 USA Current Hard Music Albums. Rise Radiant has registered over 5 million streams on Spotify to date, and has received fantastic reviews worldwide, with Prog Magazine (UK) calling it “the best yet from Caligula’s Horse, a triumph of passion and performance.” Produced by the group’s Sam Vallen and mixed by the esteemed Jens Bogren (Opeth, Devin Townsend Project, Leprous), Rise Radiant features lead single ‘Slow Violence’, plus 2 bonus track covers of the Split Enz song ‘Message To My Girl’ & Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’, which also features a guest appearance by Lynsey Ward of Exploring Birdsong.

In 2024, the band will release their 6th studio album Charcoal Grace, and it combines raw rockpower with immense emotional depth.Charcoal Grace is borne of the static hopelessness that the pandemic forced upon the band and, indeed, much of the world, these past few years. It is an album reckoning with the experiences and outcomes of this time geared, ultimately, towards catharsis – moving towards a more hopeful future.

Caligula’s Horse proudly endorses Ernie Ball Music Man strings and guitars, Klotz, Mesa/Boogie, and Fractal Audio, Dingwall basses, Pearl Drums, Remo drum heads and VRATIM Drum Shoes.

Novelists (often known in print as Novelists FR) are a French progressive metalcore band from Paris who formed in 2013. They are currently signed to Out of Line Music.

Novelists was founded in 2013 by brothers Amael and Florestan Durand. Shortly after, Matteo Gelsomino, Nicolas Delestrade, and Charles-Henri Teule joined, after the split of their previous band, A Call to Sincerity.[1] In April 2014, they released a demo with 6 songs. In July 2015, they signed with the record label Arising Empire, and in November they released their debut studio album, Souvenirs. In June 2017, the band released the single "The Light, the Fire". After this, they toured with While She Sleeps and Northlane. A month later, they signed with SharpTone Records, and released their second studio album, Noir, in September 2017.

Novelists released their third studio album, titled C'est La Vie, in January 2020.

In April 2020, the band parted ways with Gelsomino as vocalist and started an online audition process to find a new singer.

On 27 October 2020, Novelists announced that Tobias Rische, formerly of Alazka, would be replacing Gelsomino as their new vocalist. A month later, the band signed with Out of Line Music, a record label based in Berlin, and released the single "Lost Cause". Two further singles were issued in 2021: "Terrorist" and "Do You Really Wanna Know?" The band supported Imminence on a European tour in May 2022 and played the Tech-Fest in the UK in June–July of the same year. In 2022, Novelists released two further singles, "Smoke Signals" and "Heretic", the latter featuring singer Florian Salfati of the band LANDMVRKS.

On 6 April 2023, Novelists announced on their Instagram page that Rische had left the band. In September, it was announced that Camille Contreras was taking over vocal duties.

Voice of Baceprot (Sundanese pronunciation: [ba.t͡ʃə.prot]; bah-che-prot, lit. 'loudness/noise')—often abbreviated as VOB—are an Indonesian all-female rock trio formed in Garut, West Java, in 2014. The group consists of Firda Marsya Kurnia (vocals and guitar), Widi Rahmawati (bass), and Euis Siti Aisyah (drums). They sing in English as well as Sundanese. The word baceprot means "noisy" in Sundanese. It is meant to represent the band's musical style.

VOB formed in the West Javan town of Singajaya, Garut, in 2014, after the members, who were school friends, were introduced to heavy metal by their counselor, who saw music as an outlet for their proactive, rebellious nature, which had gotten them in trouble with teachers. They generated numerous views on YouTube with a cover of a Rage Against the Machine song in 2015. The trio continued to produce videos of cover songs by artists such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, and Slipknot. The band presented a seemingly contradictory image, with their heavy style of playing, in contrast to their modest Islamic attire, including the hijab, worn by all three members. This has caused them to receive criticism from some conservative Muslims in their hometown of Garut. They have also received support, however, from various quarters. All three women had been learning to play musical instruments at school and were encouraged by their theatre coach to sign up for band competitions. Their coach went on to become their manager as well as lyricist.