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What an incredible 2025 it’s been in the world of prog. This year, we’ve taken a different approach to our Critics’ Choice – instead of publishing our writers’ Top 20 lists, we’ve pooled them to create a definitive Top 50 with profile pieces on some of the key players. Did your favourite make the cut? We look forward to reading your thoughts on the results.
50. Maud The Moth – The Distaff
The ancient Greek poem by Erinna that gave Amaya López-Carromero – aka Maud The Moth – the title for her fourth album was the jumping-off point for the Spanish singer and multi- instrumentalist’s dissection of the place of femininity in modern society. It’s as dramatic as any Hellenic play, alternating between moments of anxious darkness and sunlit beauty, with López-Carromero backed by cello, sax, violin and some astounding drumming courtesy of acclaimed jazz percussionist Seb Roachford. However, the dominant instrument is Maud The Moth herself – a gothic prog Maria Callas or Diamanda Galás.
Prime cut: A Temple By The River
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49. Anna von Hausswolff – Iconoclasts
The Swedish art-rocker’s sixth studio album shows how high her stock has risen, attracting collaborators such as Ethel Cain and Iggy Pop, although the latter is unlikely to raise a flutter of interest from some prog fans. Whether with guests or on her own, von Hausswolff constructs some absorbing jazz-inflected art-rock here, not least on both The Beast and Struggle With The Beast, while the towering 11-minute The Iconoclast flexes serious prog muscle.
Prime cut: The Iconoclast
48. Black Country, New Road – Forever Howlong
Having survived the traumatic departure of singer Isaac Wood in 2022, just four days ahead of the release of second album Ants From Up There, the Cambridge modern prog collective regrouped, rallied and moved forward with Forever Howlong. Their third long-player saw the female members of the band step up to the mics and the band add a delightfully whimsical folk aspect to their sometimes complex and sometimes melodic sound.
Prime cut: Two Horses
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47. Lars Fredrrik Frøislie – Gamle Mester
There’s a reason that the title of the Wobbler keyboard player’s second solo album translates as ‘Old Master’ – it’s as classic and decorous as any painting hanging in the Stockholm National Gallery. Even more than in his regular band, it finds him channelling the spirit of the pre-digital age via vintage keyboards, Mellotrons and even a harpsichord. There’s a misty, sepia-toned air to the epic sweep of Jakten På Det Kalydonske Villsvin and even the groovy title track could have soundtracked a great lost early-70s Swedish movie. One of the year’s most lovingly well-crafted throwbacks.
Prime cut: Jakten På Det Kalydonske Villsvin
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46. Michael Woodman – Hiss Of Today
Thumpermonkey man Michael Woodman’s ongoing campaign to remain a fraction out of step with everyone else continues with his debut solo album. Hiss Of Today isn’t quite as knottily weird as his day job, but nevertheless does a great job of nudging familiar sounds into strange new forms: The Button is unsettling alt prog peppered with retro videogame sounds and Lychgate marches to a clockwork rhythm where all the clocks are busted. There’s a strange magick to it – fitting, given Woodman’s love of Aleister Crowley.
Prime cut: Lychgate
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45. Jinjer – Duel
“I want to play on proggier bills and I generally consider that, by now, Jinjer has become one of the biggest prog metal bands,” bassist Eugene Abdukhanov told Prog earlier this year. While not every Prog reader would agree with him, or even give his band the time of day, those who do find the Ukrainian quartet delving further into the genre with every release. Duél still packs an almighty wallop, but those who do listen in are richly rewarded.
Prime cut: Kafka
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44. AVKRVST – Waving At The Sky
This young Norwegian quintet, like many modern-day prog acts, are far more deserving of attention than they get from some areas of the prog community. Be it their youth, a tongue-twisting band name or the (very) rare dip into more metallic Opeth territory, Christ knows why, but it’s a sad state of affairs. That said, their bold second album showed a maturity beyond their years and an ever-developing identity that will hopefully serve them well with their next steps.
Prime cut: Families Are Forever
43. Spock’s Beard – The Archaeoptimist
Seven years after their last album, Spock’s Beard have shuffled the decks once more. The Archaeoptimist finds keyboard player Ryo Okumuto shouldering the bulk of the songwriting duties with help in a non-performing capacity from I Am The Manic Whale’s Michael Whiteman, while drummer Nick D’Virgilio has stepped back once more (his place is taken by Nick Potters). The result is an album that shows Spock’s Beard at their most melodically streamlined – even the surprisingly funky 20-minute title track goes down smoothly. But there’s no disguising class, and The Archaeoptimist has it in spades.
Prime cut: The Archaeoptimist
42. Gösta Berlings Saga – Forever Now
Twenty-five years in and the Swedes’ psychedelic prog swirl is as vibrantly vivid and warmly strange as ever. Their seventh album finds them wandering down a few strange avenues, but always returning to the place they know best. A series of personal losses and the after-effects of the pandemic partly shaped Forever Now, but this is no instrumental pity party – the coruscating Through The Arches and Ascension’s wiggy jazzbo swing fizz with a barely contained joy and beat with an exuberant analogue heart.
Prime cut: Through The Arches
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41. Imperial Triumphant – Goldstar
Like a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost cruising through the ruins of jazz- age Gotham City, masked New Yorkers Imperial Triumphant’s sixth album is equal parts beauty and desolation. The disorientating sweep of Gomorrah Nouveaux and Lexington Delirium’s sax-augmented menace draw on both the roaring aggression of extreme metal and twisting, elastic chops of prog and jazz, roping in such kindred spirits as Meshuggah’s Tomas Haake and ex-Slayer/Fantômas drummer Dave Lombardo along the way. Easy listening? Absolutely not. But what truly great music is?
Prime cut: Gomorrah Nouveaux
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40. Steeleye Span – Conflict
The veteran folk rockers, beloved by many prog fans, continued their late-career flurry of quality releases with Conflict, another more recent offering from the Span that definitely puts the rock into folk rock. The title is a timely nod to the parlous state of the world and the album kicks off in rousing fashion with a rollicking rendition of John Tams’ Over The Hills And Far Away and doesn’t let up. The ballsy Genocide is pure hard rock fun, even!
Prime cut: Over The Hills And Far Away
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39. Tiberius – Singing For Company
A terrific result for the young Scottish prog rockers’ second full-length release, and just reward for the ambition they showed throughout. Definitely not scholars of the less-is-more philosophy, the band threw absolutely everything and the kitchen sink into the ebullient Singing For Company, and backed it up with great songs, dazzling musicianship and a stellar clean vocal performance from Grant Barclay. Think proggy Iron Maiden jamming with Leprous and you’re just about there.
Prime cut: Soul Saviour
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38. Pavlov’s Dog – Wonderlust
An entry tinged with great sadness, given that singer David Surkamp’s wife and former vocalist Sara passed away in November, while keyboardist David Hamilton died in June. The band’s first new album for seven years showed them to be in fine fettle, with Surkamp’s sense of melodrama intact, as well as his astonishing voice, which might not hit those top notes of yore with such regularity, but on the likes of Anyway There’s Snow and the dramatic Another Blood Moon they recall former glories with style.
Prime cut: Another Blood Moon
37. Gwenno – Utopia
The Cornish and Welsh-singing psychedelic artist spread her wings somewhat on her fourth release, adding English to her vocal repertoire and evoking a feel of European popular music in the 1960s and 70s. Ghost Of You certainly had a distinctive Gallic feel, while, rather charmingly, 73 was named after a London bus route. With Gwenno in a blonde wig on the cover, there’s definitely the feel of an artist aiming at a wider audience here.
Prime cut: 73
36. Chimpan A – M.I.A. Vol. 1
Magenta mainstay Robert Reed and singer Steve Balsamo certainly aimed to make an impact with Chimpan A’s third release. They issued a series of covers of very well-known songs, such as Wichita Lineman, Here Comes The Flood and The Air That I Breathe, which appeared on the second disc of Music s Art, the parent album that followed in their wake. Defiantly pop prog, although perhaps a bit too pop for some ears, the album also included a couple of 10-minute epics, The Keeper and Dreaming Will Kill Us Dead, which displayed Reed’s prog roots.
Prime cut: Wolves
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35. Dim Gray – Shards
The tousle-haired Norwegians really seemed to come of age with this, their third album. With their line-up comfortably expanded to a quintet, their top-notch songwriting was delivered with real class on Shards. Without a doubt it’s at the more melodic end of the prog spectrum, the likes of Defiance and Peril showing they’re clearly aiming at a bigger audience, which is something the wonderful Myopia, their duet with fellow Norwegian Vaarin, deserved in spades.
Prime cut: Myopia
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34. Lunatic Soul – The World Under Unsun
The eighth musical outing under the Lunatic Soul banner from Riverside frontman and bassist Mariusz Duda represented the culmination of his circle-of-life-and-death story, although chronologically it fits between 2014’s Walking On A Flashlight Beam and 2017’s Fractured (hey, this is prog, after all!). It was a hefty double album of excellent yet mournful electronica and prog rock with a dash of the folkier sound that crept in on 2020’s Through Shaded Woods. It’ll be fascinating to see where Duda goes from here.
Prime cut: The World Under Unsun
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33. Jakko M. Jakszyk – Son Of Glen
“King Crimson sold out to 14,000 people a night. If I play, I’m not sure 14 people will turn up,” poor old Jakko moaned to Prog earlier this year, when we spoke to him about Son Of Glen, his latest solo album. As a companion to his recent autobiography, the album explores themes of identity and family bonds through a set of largely adult contemporary rock songs, although the epic title track strikes a vibrant home run!
Prime cut: Son Of Glen
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32. Envy Of None – Stygian Wavz
You have to feel for the Canadian alt prog quartet. They were just establishing themselves as something beyond ‘someone’s side-project’ when the rug was well and truly yanked from under their feet – Alex Lifeson is now bang in the centre of the upcoming massive Rush 50 tour and all that will entail. Stygian Wavz was a more rounded work than the band’s self- titled 2022 album, although still not enough for the “I only want prog and long solos” brigade. Will we see them again, one wonders?
Prime cut: Stygian Waves
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31. Mogwai – The Bad Fire
The Scottish post-rockers kicked off 2025 with a prog- flavoured bang on their 11th album. As one might expect, there was the usual loud/quiet/loud post-rock dynamic, but maybe guitarist Stuart Braithwaite’s time in proggy post-rock supergroup Silver Moth was an influence, too. Pale Vegan Hip Pain, If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others and Fact Boy all nod in a much more prog-friendly direction for the band.
Primce cut: If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others
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30. North Sea Radio Orchestra – Special Powers
On their first album of original material for nine years, Craig Fortnam’s chamber collective continue to defy categorisation, and yet Johnny Sharp’s take in Prog 161 of “chamber pop meeting space rock in a soundlab full of analogue synths” did a pretty good job of nailing it. As a slice of most pleasurable listening, Special Powers once again reminded us that this special band really should be something of a household name.
Prime cut: Special Powers
29. Cosmograf – The Orphan Epoch
In some ways, The Orphan Epoch, the 10th release from Cosmograf mainman Robin Armstrong, saw him breaking new ground while also resolutely sticking to his guns. A homespun DIY project on his own Gravity Dream Music label meant Armstrong could do exactly as he pleased – budget permitting – while the subject matter from the arch-conceptualist does not, for once, revolve around a singular theme. Not that it hindered us from enjoying yet another great record from the ever-reliable Mr Armstrong.
Prime cut: Kings And Lords
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28. Katatonia – Nightmares As Extensions Of The Waking State
It was all-change for the Swedish miserablists as co-founder and guitarist Anders Nyström quit in acrimonious circumstances when the album was announced – the gist seemingly being that he wanted early metal, while fellow founder Jonas Renkse favoured the more recent moody atmospherics. The latter carried on like nothing had happened, with an album as wonderfully mournful as any in the band’s rich canon of work.
Primce cut: Efter Solen
27. Coheed And Cambria – Vaxis Act III: The Father Of Make Believe
Despite being another deep-dive into his Amory Wars mythos, and the third album in the band’s current Vaxis series, mainman Claudio Sanchez referred to their 11th studio album overall as a “midlife crisis” record. …The Father Of Make Believe certainly features some of his most personal lyrics to date, along with the expected epic tunes and intricate musical muscle-flexing workouts.
Prime cut: The Continuum
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26. Bioscope – Gentō
On paper, the combination of Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery and Thorsten Quaeschning, modern-day skipper of the good ship Tangerine Dream, was intriguing. Add in Elbow drummer Alex Reeves and the resulting album was a delight for those who can’t get enough of Rothery’s dreamlike guitar atmospherics and the Tangs’ bubbling progtronica. Like many such side-projects, however, it didn’t quite grab the wider audience it really deserved, possibly due to its soundscape nature. We loved it, though.
Prime cut: Kaleidoscope
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25. Jo Quail – Notan
Quail’s first release on her own label, Adderstone, shows how far she’s developed as an artist since Prog first saw her at Prognosis Festival in Eindhoven in 2019. Now a major part of the firmament, her seventh album melds her classical, post-rock, metal and prog influences into a beautiful and far-reaching sound, utilising the Japanese concept of light and dark in balance. A quite special artist.
Prime cut: Rex
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24. Hawkwind – There Is No Space For Us
And so the good ship Hawkwind continues its journey, now on the band’s 37th studio release. The harrowing ecological messages of recent albums is writ large, although in truth Captain Brock was challenging listeners on this front way back in 1971 with We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago. There Is No Space for us continues the rich vein of form the band have been on since 2016’s Into The Woods. Long may they continue.
Prime cut: Changes (Burning Suns And Frozen Waste)
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23. Wardruna – Birna
Einar Selvik’s dark Nordic folk collective continue to dazzle, this time with a concept album based on the she-bear (the Birna of Norse mythology) and through that, seasonal cycles and man’s relationship with nature. Even if, as Paul Travers noted in Prog 156, no one actually knows what the music of Selvik’s forbears actually sounded like, Wardruna still deliver with what sounds like a startling air of authenticity.
Prime cut: Dvaledraumar
22. The Utopia Strong – Doperider
The third full- length release for the Kavus Torabi, Steve Davis and Michael J York psychedelic supergroup sees them confidently assuming a more developed sense of identity and sound. “Doperider doesn’t just begin and end; it unfolds, then folds in on itself”, wrote Julian Marszalek in Prog 164, of the album by a band who truly grasp the cosmic essence behind the progtronica of the 1970s, bringing it into the here and now with style.
Prime cut: Harpies
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21. Spriggan Mist – The Glare
What a year for Bracknell’s folk prog troupe! Spriggan Mist delivered on the promise of their boisterously fun live shows with an album (their first for US specialist Progrock.com’s Essentials) in real style with The Glare. Continuing the good-natured vibe of those live shows but with added musical depth, proper prog and a towerhouse performance from singer Fay Brotherhood. They even got the prog community dancing – no mean feat!
Prime cut: Ianatores Teresteres
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20. Ghost Of The Machine – Empires Must Fall
It’s been a stellar few years for these northern proggers, who continued making friends with their energetic live shows. The last 12 months, however, have undoubtedly been the best of all for the sextet, with a brand-new record deal with ProgRock.com’s Essentials, who released the band’s second album in February. Empires Must Fall is a bold conceptual piece that built upon thematic and musical ideas that the band introduced on their 2022 debut, Scissorgames, but elevated Ghost Of The Machine to a much higher level.
Prime cut: Panopticon
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19. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Phantom Island
Like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’ll get from this prolific Australian crew, which must be a nightmare for those prog fans who just want the same old stuff over and over again. In this case, for album number 27, the band added orchestral embellishment to a softer rock palette than is their norm in a most effective manner. Who knows where they might go next?
Prime cut: Grow Wings And Fly
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18. Rick Wakeman – Melancholia
Wakeman’s fourth piano-based album in a decade, Melancholia was his first in four years, but immediately strikes the listener as his most personal collection. Although the title hinted at a downbeat theme, Wakeman told Prog in October that “melancholy is an emotion, and not necessarily a bad one”. With quiet reflection written all over it, self- explanatory titles such as Alone and Sitting By The Window helped the music hit home with real understated power.
Prime cut: Dance Of The Ghosts
17. Midlake – A Bridge Too Far
Viewed by some as an indie folk outfit, these days the Texans tend to occupy territory similar to like- minded US bands The Decemberists and Fleet Foxes, with lush prog never far away from the essence of what they do. A Bridge Too Far, Midlake’s sixth album might not be one for the purists, but prog fans with more accepting ears will lap up the likes of Guardians and the title track.
Prime cut: The Ghouls
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16. Green Carnation – A Dark Poem, Part I: The Shores Of Melancholia
The first part in an ambitious trilogy of album releases that was inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s dreamy ode to Shakespeare’s Ophelia (which the Norwegian prog rockers have recorded already, but will be released individually). Epic in both scope and sound, the latter being the band’s rich, melodic take on the genre best described as Rainbow’s Rising if it were a prog album, Part I works as an entity in its own right while also leaving the listener desperate to hear the next instalments.
Prime cut: Too Close To The Flame
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15. Jonathan Hultén – Eyes Of The Living Night
How this Swedish prog musician isn’t a bigger draw in the UK is one of life’s imponderables. One can only assume the fact he was once a guitarist in a metal band stands against him with some. There’s nothing metal about Hultén’s sound, however; on this, his second full-length excursion, he mixes pure prog with dreampop, classical flourishes and electronica creating a rich and majestic sound, all steeped in the most exotic of imagery.
Prime cut: The Saga And The Storm
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14. Karmakanic – Transmutation
The last time Jonas Reingold released a Karmakanic album (Dot in 2016) he wasn’t even a member of Steve Hackett’s band. Inevitably, Hackett crops up on the guest-packed Transmutation, alongside Simon Phillips, Craig Blundell, Tangent buddies Luke Machin and Andy Tillison, and BBT drummer Nick D’Virgilio. It wasn’t just great guests, though – Reingold brought gold-plated songs along too!
Prime cut: Transmutation
13. The Emerald Dawn – The Land, The Sea, The Air (Vol. 1)
Cornwall’s prog quartet wear their ecological heart very much on their sleeve for their sixth album, part one of which centres on the sea and the air, while a follow-up volume will deal with the land. Laudable subject matter is made more coherent with the band’s wonderful and vibrant effervescent sound. You can sense their pain at the environmental damage done in Tree Stewart’s haunting vocal delivery.
Prime cut: Under Changing Skies
12. The Flower Kings – Love
As reliable as the day is long, Sweden’s The Flower Kings are pretty much an institution these days, consistently delivering quality albums. Love, their 17th, saw mainman Roine Stolt making a plea for calm level-headedness in a world currently running amok, which was enough to raise the ire of some fans with more extremist views. Come on, seriously? This is Roine Stolt!
Prime cut: We Claim The Moon
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11. Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Bees In The Bonnet
Despite being tagged primarily in the jazz field, most Prog readers will know that Hedvig Mollestad can prog and rock it up with the best of them. It was very much the latter for her eighth album with her trusted trio, a set of powerful rock songs featuring Mollestad’s blistering lead guitar.
Prime cut: Apocalypse Slow
10. Gazpacho – Magic 8-Ball
When it came to writing their 12th album, Gazpacho keyboard player and mastermind Thomas Andersen told Prog that his away from the band wanted to get nuanced restraint of their last few albums and “make some noise”. Clearly one person’s overwhelming racket is another’s all-enveloping ambience, because Magic 8-Ball is as graceful and approachable as its predecessors.
Fittingly for a record written after they binned a first attempt when the movie Don’t Look Up came out with exactly the same plot, the title refers to lives dictated by luck, chance and randomness – a sliding-doors view of life that’s at odds with such well- crafted music. While the title track provides a shot of unexpected, carnival-style playfulness, Starling, Immerwahr and the glorious The Unrisen billow and float.
Like Gazpacho’s best records, Magic 8-Ball is a frictionless listen in the best possible way. No one does it better.
Prime cut: Starling
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9. Jethro Tull – Curious Ruminant
Is Ian Anderson being disingenuous when he claims the title of Jethro Tull’s 24th album isn’t a sly synonym for ‘nosey cow’? Maybe. Either way it’s heartening to see that Tull’s frontman, 78 years young when he recorded Curious Ruminant, is still driven by an inquisitiveness towards the world. It continues the unexpected late- career hot streak that began when Anderson resurrected the Tull name for 2022’s The Zealot Gene and continued through the following year’s RökFlöte.
As with those albums, age has softened the frontman’s spiky edges, but what it lacks in abrasiveness it makes up for in rustic ambience and intellectual and emotional depth on Savannah Of Paddington Green and Over Jerusalem, the latter an empathetic take on the current situation in Israel and Gaza. How many more albums Anderson has in him remains to be seen, so let’s cherish Tull while we can.
Prime cut: Drink From The Same Well
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8. Between The Buried And Me – The Blue Nowhere
North Carolina’s prog metal exports have a reputation for throwing the kitchen sink at their records. One minute they’re channelling King Crimson and Pink Floyd, the next they’re peddling death metal, country or synthpop. Their 11th album, which uses a fictional hotel to put the human condition under the microscope, is no different, but it’s also highly mature, melodic and intelligent.
It’s their first record as a quartet following Dustie Waring’s 2023 departure, but there’s no sense that the move left them lacking in ideas. From yacht rock to Absent Thereafter’s heavy metal bluegrass and Danny Elfman-esque orchestrations on Mirador Uncoil, their sound proves as tactfully scattershot as ever.
“There’s something of Frank Zappa’s appreciation for musical absurdism in their proclivity for cramming wildly contrasting ideas together,” Prog’s David West mused. However, as abrasive as The Blue Nowhere gets, there’s a superlative prog band in among the calculated chaos. That’s well worth riding the rollercoaster for.
Prime cut: Things We Tell Ourselves In The Dark
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7. Amplifier – Gargantuan
The financial and geographical impact of the pandemic shrank Amplifier down from a four-man outfit to a two-person operation. But on their first full album in eight years, vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sel Balamir and drummer Matt Brobin didn’t let a reduction in personnel cramp their sound.
With a running time of 58 minutes, Gargantuan doesn’t quite live up to the monumental promise of its title, but in every other respect it’s as ambitious as anything they’ve recorded. The music hovers between the earthly and the celestial, as Balamir’s jagged guitars embark on a dance with coruscating electronics throughout. Gateway is knotty and agile, Blackhole is wild and spacey, and the breezeblock riffs of Guilty Pleasure stand among the heaviest things they’ve recorded.
Balamir promises that both Gargantuan and 2023’s Hologram EP are part of an even bigger whole, a series of epic space jams titled Legacy that provided the source material for both. On this evidence, that really should be something.
Prime cut: Gateway
6. Ihlo – Legacy
Six years in the making, the young British troupe’s effervescent blend of djent, towering vintage-prog crescendos and slick, warm-yet-modern production ensures Legacy more than justifies the wait.
Formed in 2016 by keyboardist/ vocalist Andy Robison, Ihlo have grown from strength to strength. Their debut LP, Union, put them firmly on the map, and its successor charts their staggering evolution.
Now part of the Kscope family, Legacy is a little darker, but still shines bright in the modern progressive scene. It melds the pioneering angularity of TesseracT with oodles of shimmering musicality and Robison’s engaging, emotion-dripped vocals, which help drive its storytelling across slow-burning, but thoroughly rewarding soundscapes.
Prog called it “enigmatic and unskippable”, adding that “their heaviness comes not from screams, but from context and jarring rhythms,” and its success has rightfully propelled them to the forefront of modern British prog.
Prime cut: Wraith
5. IQ – Dominion
They may not be blessed with a prolific work rate – it’s been six years since their previous album, Resistance – but as with everything that IQ have released this century, Dominion proved well worth waiting for.
Trimming back on the double-album excesses of both Resistance and The Road Of Bones, their 13th album is a mere five tracks long, but what tracks they are, not least the epic opener, all 23 minutes of The Unknown Door, which stands as one of the finest pieces of music the band have ever put together.
The other four tracks are no slouches either. From the reflective One Of Us and the yearning Never Land all the way through to the other epic track, the 12-minutes-plus Far From Here, they all benefit from some exemplary production from guitarist Mike Holmes, while his old pal Pete Nicholls turns in the vocal performance of his career so far.
Like their fellow 80s contemporaries Pendragon, Solstice and, of course, Marillion, IQ don’t just have skin in the game; they’re absolutely thriving. Testament to all that hard work decades ago. Long may it continue.
Prime cut: The Unknown Door
4. Dream Theater – Parasomnia
Let’s be honest: Mike Portnoy was always going to come back to the bosom of Dream Theater at some point. But could the noise surrounding the prodigal son’s inevitable return truly be matched by his first studio album in 15 years with the band he co-founded
Of course it could. Dream Theater’s 16th album took its name from a sleep disorder that includes sleepwalking and night terrors, but there was nothing nightmarish about Parasomnia. A Broken Man and Night Terror sounded like the work of a band re-energised – whatever problems existed between Portnoy and his bandmates had clearly been banished.
Parasomnia sat at the heavier end of Dream Theater’s musical spectrum, but this wasn’t a revolution so much as a recalibration of what they are. Past glories were evoked but never replicated, testament to a progressive metal band who can still find space within the boundaries of a genre they themselves helped draw up all those decades ago.
Portnoy was always the biggest character in Dream Theater, and his return shaped the narrative of Parasomnia. But this is about more than one man; it’s the sound of a band boldly stepping into their latest chapter.
Prime cut: Night Terror
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3. Solstice – Clann
Forty-five years in and Solstice are having a moment. The third of a loose musical trilogy that began with 2020’s Sia and the galvanising recruitment of singer Jess Holland, Clann continues that late-career purple patch.
It’s a warm, intimate, yet sneakily bold record, centred around Holland’s fluid voice and founder and driving force Andy Glass’s protean guitar. They’re still hippies at heart – the euphoric Firefly and gently gorgeous Life are wreathed in herbal smoke. But as befits a band who were at home playing free festivals in the 80s, there’s a subtle but distinct anti-establishment streak, too – Frippa contains a sample of US politician Bernie Sanders ripping into greedy billionaires, while Plunk is the funkiest takedown of global capitalism delivered by a folk-prog band in recent memory.
Yet it’s the album’s longest track, Twin Peaks, that encapsulates everything that’s great about Solstice in 2025: 14 graceful minutes of liquid guitar, celestial harmonies and snaking violin that subtly shifts and transforms as it heads towards its end point.
The recent successes of prog’s class of ’82 proves that good things come to those who persevere – IQ, Pallas, Pendragon and, naturally, Marillion have all done great work this decade. On the basis of Clann alone, Solstice deserve to be up there too.
Prime cut: Twin Peaks
2. Cardiacs – LSD
It’s little wonder that Cardiacs’ long-mythologised LSD was spoken of in revered terms among the cognoscenti. The album’s 2007 origins were curtailed a year later following leader Tim Smith’s heart attack and subsequent stroke; his death in 2020 suggested an end to anything seeing the light of day.
But with the band reassembling under the aegis of co-founder and bassist Jim Smith – Tim’s brother – and co-producer and guitarist Kavus Torabi, LSD finally emerged like a secret stash of Owsley acid.
Crucially, this was no cut and shut job, but a worthy addition to a back catalogue that had steadily been gaining justified reappraisal over the years. Its arrival was met with a kind of stunned gratitude: longtime devotees embraced it as a Pentecostal blessing, while newer listeners reacted with the disbelief of people discovering gems hidden in plain sight. Critics, meanwhile, fell over themselves for the appropriate superlatives.
The music justifies the fuss. All the classic Cardiacs traits are here, from the delirious tempo pivots, the gloriously tangled melodies, and the sense that every instrument is locked in a brawl for dominance. Fast, fun and fearless, LSD is a cleansing experience that’s in keeping with the trip Cardiacs began long ago.
Prime cut: Spelled All Wrong
1. Steven Wilson – The Overview
Steven Wilson doesn’t like to repeat himself, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should follow up The Harmony Codex’s electronic puzzle with the two-part prog epic, The Overview. His eighth studio album set the idea of the overview effect – the psychological shift of viewing Earth from space – to an elegant and expansive soundtrack with a little lyrical help from XTC’s Andy Partridge.
Many fans and critics have hailed it as his finest work to date, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that The Overview should receive the highest number of votes in this year’s Critics’ Choice. In our review, we described it as “21st-century progressive music and more satisfying for it” – but it formed just one element of Wilson’s 2025 output.
Continuing his work as a sought- after remixer, he also turned his attention
this year towards creating a new Dolby Atmos mix of Pink Floyd’s Live At Pompeii, in addition to producing new mixes for Phil Collins, Jethro Tull and Solstice, among others. He’s arguably one of prog’s hardest- working and most prolific artists, an accolade he shows every indication of retaining in 2026. It’s a wonder he ever finds time to sleep!
“This is an age of a million available online opinions and increasingly,” Wilson tells Prog when asked how he feels about topping our Critics’ Choice chart. “Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve deliberately insulated myself from feedback to my work. The record company may say, ‘You got a great review in The Times,’ and I tell them not to show it to me. So I’m only now starting to realise how the album was received.
“That’s the long answer to the question. The short answer is: That’s lovely, and I really appreciate it. Getting such validation from people whose opinions I respect is astounding, so thank you all.”
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