American concertgoers gasped in palpable dismay when the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that issues artists the working visas that are required to legally perform for profit in the US, jacked their rates for that visa up by roughly 250 percent this past spring. We thought for sure this would lead to an even greater dearth of international bands touring an already unforgiving market, to say nothing of the downstream effects fewer tours would have on local businesses.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m relieved that we’re still getting a decent amount of international bands here in the States, even if they’re mostly firmly established acts. The bands that have been announced for ProgPower USA in 2025 are almost all international, and the long-running Argentine band Rata Blanca recently announced a dumbfoundingly comprehensive trek across this curious country of ours. Things aren’t looking so bad.
Perhaps in an effort to recoup the cost of those visas, Norwegian uglyprog weirdos Leprous decided to make an entire US tour out of their ProgPower USA XXIII appearance, kicking off in Nashville the day before the fest and within a few days of the release of their new album, “Melodies of Atonement.” Joining them on the final stretch of the US tour, which saw them reach Texas, was the cinematic New England band Earthside, who had recently replaced Monuments for both this tour and for ProgPower.
The Mohawk in Austin is a pretty unique venue that offers a small, indoor, bar-sized stage for local acts as well as a modest, 336 square-foot covered outdoor stage. Up to about a thousand audience members may roam freely along the floor, a corridor along stage left, and a three-tiered balcony that sits atop the building’s roof that is accessible by a staircase at either side of the stage. Thanks to the west-facing stairs that border Red River St, sunset and dusk are simply magical times for a band like Earthside to perform. Truly a band with a sound all their own, Earthside‘s djent-driven film score metal is simply tailor-made to be performed under dramatic skies.
On the strength of just two albums, this band has made a name for itself with their lengthy, involving, and mostly instrumental epics that often feature such luminary guest performers as Daniel Tompkins of Tesseract, Lajon Witherspoon of Sevendust, Speed Strid of Soilwork, and the freaking Moscow Studio Symphony Orchestra. As they rarely perform with a live vocalist (AJ Channer joined them for “Pattern of Rebirth” at a previous Austin show), Earthside instead pipes in the lead vocals on the rare song that actually features a singer. Many audience members have found this jarring at first, with some saying it feels like reverse karaoke, but Earthside‘s compositions and performances are compelling and invigorating enough to earn them a pass.
Their full production includes meticulously shot, animated, and edited videos that often feature the guest performers themselves – I remember being very impressed by the projections that accompanied “Mob Mentality” and “A Dream in Static” the first time I saw Earthside, when they toured with Leprous in 2016. Sadly, neither the Mohawk nor Come and Take It Live (where Earthside performed with Caligula’s Horse in February) were able to accommodate the screens needed for these videos, so Texas had to settle for experiencing these guys under that glorious Hill Country sky just as temperatures were becoming bearable again. Oh darn.
Earthside isn’t a band that will allow a tiny stage to constrain their performance. With talon-bearing bassist Ryan Griffin back in action (pre-Earthside bandmate Brandon Greenplayed in his place at ProgPower and for most of their following run with Soen), drummer extraordinaire Ben Shanbrom, sportcoat-sporting goofball bandleader Jaime Van Dyck, and overcaffeinated keyboardist Frank Sacramone played with enough passion and aplomb to fully win over what previously might have been a crowd more resistant to their unorthodox approach to live performance. Sacramone adapted to the venue’s unusual layout particularly well, leaving the stage and running up the eastern stairs to finish out set closer “The Closest I’ve Come” while overlooking both the crowd and the darkening welkin at dusk. It’s not quite the giant trampoline he clearly wants to have on stage, but any port in a storm, ammirite?
EARTHSIDE Photo Gallery
The sky was bible-black in Austin when we met the evening’s headliners. For a band that’s seen so much activity and so many permutations over their 23 years, Leprous has honed a sound that is as unintuitive and brooding as it is organic and perversely inspiring. Even on lush arrangements like “The Last Milestone,” “Castaway Angels,” and the opening harmonies of “Restless” – all pieces that one could argue are objectively beautiful – the music Leprous creates can hardly be described as “pretty.”
As other bands of that era stepped away from the classic prog-metal trappings by embracing heaviness, wrath, and examining the human condition, Leprous eventually forged their own path by being punishingly severe. Echoing Opeth‘s fondness for mesmeric repetition, Leprous added in bizarro rhythmic patterns, syncopation, and accents; eight-string guitars for extra gravity, sparse minimalism, a drummer who left freaking Borknagar to play more intense music, and the unearthly voice of the towering giant that is Einar Solberg, all to create a sound that is as dense as it is expansive. This music does not soar listeners into enlightenment. Instead, it drags listeners involuntarily towards the abyss where the listener makes the horrifying discovery that they themselves are that abyss.
So yeah. Ugly-prog. Ear-twitching, dissonant, and gorgeously rewarding ugly-prog. “Silently Walking Alone” was not only the ideal tune to open the new album, but it defined what Leprous was about to deliver: an enrapturing, engrossing, and above all, hypnotic performance.
All because of you.
Where Earthside would counter the weight of their music with their good-natured dorktitude in between songs, not once would Leprous ease up on the solemnity of their sound. Even when while deprecating themselves and introducing new guy Harrison White, the Leprous boys were unnervingly and almost disarmingly stoic, reserving all their energy for the intensity of their performance. Bassist Simen Børven, guitarists Tor Oddmund Suhrke and Robin Ognedal, and Solberg himself were all over that stage, swinging their arms and the necks of their instruments as though they were baseball bats, writhing and convulsing from downstage risers like demonically possessed jötnar.
Drummer Baard Kolstad was in particularly ravaging form, beating lifeless the skins that are his instrument, and putting to shame many of the Norse forefathers on whose shoulders he stands. My affinity for progressive black metal is no secret, but observing Kolstad from overhead made clear to me why he chose to leave my beloved Borknagar to focus on these shorthairs: Leprous is every bit as brutal as Borknagar. That savagery is just channeled differently.
Throughout this tour, Leprous have selected a handful of fans in attendance to join them onstage for the closing choir parts of “Faceless.” As awesome as it is to have seen friends join such a luminary band, nothing beats seeing kids join in on the fun. The five fans who held this honor in Austin included a daddy/ daughter duo. Having seen my own child get such awesome treatment at metal shows (we hung out backstage with Nightwish on birthday number 10; top that!), I find it incredibly heartwarming to see other dads continuing that tradition.
Sadly missing from the night’s setlist was the aforementioned 100% mellow ”Castaway Angels,” a song I can’t deny drew tears when Leprous played it at ProgPower. In its place, however, was a lone Einar at the keyboard, lamenting his late father with “The Last Milestone” and that unmistakable falsetto for an intoxicating eight minutes, leaving a significant chunk of the audience with moistened eyes.
Leprous ended their main set with “Atonement” and the closing of “The Sky is Red” only to re-enter the stage for an apparently unplanned encore. Addressing the crowd and thanking them for their attendance seemed to be the first time this entire evening that the Leprous donned even semblances of smiles, with Einar wondering aloud if all water in the United States is canned before asking us what we wanted to hear. I was elated to hear others join me in my chants of “WHITE!!! WHITE WHITE!! WHITE!!!” but Einar quickly shot that prospect down. “That is completely unreasonable. Anything from “Tall Poppy Syndrome” is completely unreasonable,” he warned us. “I don’t think Robin has even heard that album. He was playing in a gospel band back then,” he teased to an audience who was also smiling for the first time since Leprous hit the stage.
Einar then crushed his now-empty can and told us “Whoever catches this can pick three songs, and maybe we will play one of them” as he tossed it into what became the mildest mosh pit I’ve ever seen. The victor emerged shouting “SLAVE! THE FLOOD! FORCED FUCKING ENTRY!”
If you’ve ever seen Leprous, you can probably guess what their encore was. “Forced Entry” featured early in their ProgPower set this year, and ending the night with such a frenetic song gave me the shot in the arm I needed to make the ninety-minute trek back home. However healing entrancement might have been for my nonexistent soul, it’s not a great state of mind under which to navigate Austin traffic.
LEPROUS Photo Gallery
