Progressive Rock
Self-released · 2 October 2026
“The Angels and the Playground” runs fifteen minutes and forty-nine seconds and takes almost half of a five-track, thirty-seven-minute album. The singer on it is Robin Peachey of Returned to the Earth, not Caio Claro, who fronts the band. About halfway through there is a stretch of spoken vocal, somewhere short of rap, inside a song that is otherwise melodic prog built on keyboards and electric guitar.
Drowning Steps are Brazilian and have been going for about a decade. It began as Claro’s solo project (vocals and guitars) and now works as a duo with Fabrício Mendonça on drums, with three more players on the record: Leonardo Gonçalves on bass, Marcos Duran on a second guitar and Tiago Pierucci on keyboards, synth, organ, piano, wah-wah guitar and backing vocals. They put it out themselves on 2 October.
The two advance singles are tracks two and three, and also the two shortest. “Fragments of a Lifetime” (3:31) is the most direct thing here and features Laís Gonzalez; “The Nod” (5:41) is sung by Erlend Viken of Soup and Giant Sky, and it is where Pierucci’s synth moves to the front instead of padding underneath. “Waiting for Redemption” (9:19) is the heaviest of the five and toughens up towards the end, and the album closes with “Life Handed Me the Map”, two minutes and forty-five seconds of ballad.
Three of the five songs are sung by somebody else — Peachey, Gonzalez and Viken. On his own band’s album the singer of Drowning Steps is left with two, one of which is the two-minute ballad at the end. The guests are good, each on his or her own track, and what you are left with is a backing that holds and three singers passing through. The title ends in “Book One”, and what is here is thirty-seven minutes: from the fifteen-minute piece to the two-and-three-quarter-minute ballad.
Self-released, 2 October 2026. Five tracks, 37:05. Caio Claro (vocals, guitars) and Fabrício Mendonça (drums), with Leonardo Gonçalves, Marcos Duran and Tiago Pierucci, and guest vocals from Robin Peachey, Laís Gonzalez and Erlend Viken.
Rating: 6.9/10
Text by Guillem Cardós