Progressive Rock
3 July 2026
The first fifty-six seconds of “Quetzalcoatl” are atmosphere and nothing else, an “Intro” whose job is to let the title track’s riff in: Tim Cox’s guitar with the weight of seventies hard rock behind it, and a short song structure, five and a half minutes, with no ambition to turn into a suite. The Tirith’s fourth studio album runs sixty-nine minutes across twelve tracks and arrives with the most settled line-up of their current run: Cox on guitar, Richard Cory on bass and vocals, Paul Williams on drums since 2020 and Anthony Hill on keyboards since September 2022.
The band come from Loughborough, in Leicestershire, where they played as Minas Tirith in the seventies, and they write out of that vocabulary without pretending otherwise. “Moon King”, seven minutes, is the most narrative thing here and the track that makes best use of the fourth member: it starts restrained and gathers symphonic weight as Hill fills the room. “Back To Space” leans towards the neo-prog of Pallas with synth melodies that look to Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s “Trilogy”, and “Dancing With Vampires” plants itself in the “Spectres” era of Blue Öyster Cult, as much for the subject as for the way it’s sung. “Masters Of Highways”, nine minutes, saves a coda of soloing that is asking to be played live.
Across sixty-nine minutes almost everything moves at the same mid-tempo, and the only real acceleration comes halfway through “The Slide”: it’s brief, it works, and that is exactly why you notice what the rest of the record is missing. Even so, the album holds the distance without filler, and “No Mind (Mushin)”, with earthy rhythms, piano and open textures, shows a band that no longer writes riffs alone. “Save The Oak” was released as a single on 1 May, and the band play Prog Rhino 3 at the Greystones in Sheffield on 18 October.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós