Progressive RockMetalJazz
Two months of silence on the radar add up to plenty. Here’s what July and August 2026 left behind in progressive rock, metal and jazz: first the records we’ve already had time to properly assess, then the ones that came out within these two months and are only just starting to circulate, and finally the ones already scheduled for autumn.
The Reviews
Mono – Snowdrop
Temporary Residence Limited · 12 June 2026
For close to twenty-five years now, this Tokyo quartet has been building a body of work unlike anything else in instrumental rock. Takaakira Goto and Yoda on guitars, Tamaki on bass and piano, and Dahm on drums have steadily refined an approach that owes as much to post-rock as to chamber music, and that has always worked with the same raw material: the distance between silence and the avalanche.
“Snowdrop” is, above all else, a farewell. The record was cut at Electrical Audio, Steve Albini’s studio, who had produced several of the band’s earlier records and was a friend of theirs; his death hangs over all eight pieces, each one named after a flower. Brad Wood handled production and Chad McCullough wrote the orchestral arrangements, with an ensemble of ten musicians and an eight-voice choir that widen the band’s sound without sweetening it. The result keeps the same architecture as always — the long build, the release — but the orchestral apparatus adds an elegiac weight that makes the falls hit harder than usual.
Rating: 8.9/10
Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe – After The Storm
A suite in four movements · recorded in February 2026
Satoko Fujii resists the Duke Ellington comparisons, but they’re hard to avoid. At a time when keeping a big band going is close to financial recklessness, the Japanese pianist and composer has led one after another: Berlin, Kobe, Nagoya, New York, Tokyo. What links her to Ellington isn’t the style but the method: understanding the orchestra as both a collection of individual voices and a single organism that never stops moving.
The suite was written during the pandemic and, rather than turning toward desolation, it deliberately chooses the other side: the capacity to heal and come back together. The fifteen musicians recorded it in February 2026 in front of an audience of twenty people, an almost absurd degree of intimacy for an orchestral recording, and you can feel it. Each movement works both as a composition and as a framework for improvisation; the first opens with a long double-bass solo from Keishiro Saito that makes you think you’re listening to a small group, until the orchestra gradually emerges underneath. It’s the gesture that defines the record: the mass never crushes the voice holding it up.
Rating: 8.7/10
Jim Rotondi & Dena DeRose – Out of the Past
Recorded in Vienna on 23 June 2024 · posthumous release
Trumpeter Jim Rotondi and pianist-singer Dena DeRose had wanted to record together for more than three decades, and life kept getting in the way. With both of them teaching at the Graz music university, Rotondi decided to put an end to the delay: he booked a studio in Vienna and called in bassist Danny Ziemann and drummer Mario Gonzi. The quartet recorded on 23 June 2024. Two weeks later, Rotondi died of a heart attack, two months short of his sixty-second birthday. The record arrives, then, as an unintended farewell.
It’s worth insisting this isn’t a sad record, and that’s exactly its virtue. DeRose sings on five of the nine tracks and plays piano on all of them; Rotondi takes the lead alone on the other four, open horn on three and muted on a reading of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” that’s pure restrained elegance. The repertoire blends rarely visited pieces like “Blue Gardenia” with heavyweight standards — “Charade”, “Moon River”, “The More I See You” — and an original blues, “Blues for Axel”. This is repertoire jazz made by people who no longer have anything to prove, and you can feel the relaxation of musicians playing purely for pleasure.
Rating: 8.5/10
Karmamoi – Eternal Mistake
Seventh studio album · 17 April 2026
Italians Karmamoi have spent seven records building a progressive sound of wide textures and long structures, and “Eternal Mistake” is their most openly conceptual work yet. The line-up — Daniele Giovannoni on drums, keyboards and vocals, Valerio Sgargi on vocals, keyboards and guitars, Alex Massari on guitars and Alessandro Cefalì on bass — lays out a science-fiction narrative here: a human and a humanoid searching for a genuine connection within a digital landscape, ending up wondering whether love itself might be the “eternal mistake” of the title.
The record opens with a spoken narration over an orchestral backdrop and keeps that theatrical tone from start to finish, which gives it momentum but also demands discipline to avoid getting bogged down in over-emphasis. It pulls that off with well-chosen, well-used guests: Adam Holzman brings the Rhodes, acoustic piano and a Moog solo on “Hero”, Randy McStine contributes the guitar solo on “Nothing But”, and Susanna Brigatti sings on “We Are Going Home”. These are interventions that serve as counterpoint, not as selling points, and that says a lot about how well thought-out the whole thing is.
Rating: 8.4/10
Pedro Luis Ferrer – La Bunga
Dot Time Records
Pedro Luis Ferrer is a singular figure in Cuban music: a singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and scholar of the island’s traditional forms, with a long career that’s often awkward for easy categorisation. “La Bunga” shows him alongside Lena Ferrer, with a minimalist setup that ends up producing the opposite result of what its credits sheet would suggest.
Because what he plays on it is practically everything: lead and harmony vocals, batá, timbales, keyboards, laúd, tres, guitar, bass, strings, brass and piano, with Lena Ferrer on vocal harmonies. Two people who sound like a full band, without the layering ever smelling of the studio lab. That’s the record’s charm: all the rhythmic muscle is there, but filtered through a songwriting sensibility that never loses sight of the melody.
Rating: 8.4/10
Jalen Baker – RePaved
Cellar Music Group
The vibraphone remains an instrument with few distinctive voices in today’s jazz, and Jalen Baker is one well worth following. “RePaved” presents him as both performer and composer, surrounded by a line-up that deliberately avoids the standard quintet format: Alexandria DeWalt on flute, Paul Cornish on piano, Gabriel Godoy on double bass, Gavin Moolchan on drums, and a string quartet that doesn’t serve as decorative cushioning but as another voice within the arrangements.
The record takes as its starting point a neighbourhood erased by urban development, but it avoids any tone of monument or lament. Its thesis is different: the people and stories of those streets are still here, even if the streets themselves aren’t. Musically, that translates into a luminous sound, free of any commemorative weight, where the combination of vibraphone, flute and strings gives an unusually transparent texture and leaves plenty of room for Cornish’s piano to breathe.
Rating: 8.3/10
Anthony Phillips – Gemini: Pieces For Piano
Cherry Red Records · 10 April 2026
Anthony Phillips is still routinely introduced as Genesis’s co-founding guitarist, which, more than fifty years and dozens of solo records later, has become genuinely unfair to him. He left the band in 1970, after “Trespass”, and has since built a discreet, enormously prolific body of work as a composer and multi-instrumentalist, in which the “Private Parts & Pieces” series has served as the laboratory for almost all of his ideas.
“Gemini” is a piano collection, and the title isn’t decorative: the record works around duality, around pieces that face each other in pairs. There’s nothing here of the symphonic prog his biography might lead you to expect; what you get instead is chamber music in the most literal sense, written for a single instrument and with a restraint that demands attentive listening. It’s the Phillips we know — clear melody, harmony that never raises its voice — but stripped down to the bone.
Rating: 8.2/10
New Releases From the Two Months
Records released during July and August that we haven’t had enough listens to score yet. We’ll review them properly in due course; for now, here’s what we know.
Steve Hackett & Steve Rothery – The Roaring Waves
InsideOut Music · 28 August 2026
Two major names in progressive guitar — the ex-Genesis man and Marillion’s own — team up for an entirely instrumental record inspired by the sea, with “The Black Sea” and “Red Dragon” already released as previews. They’re joined by Riccardo Romano, of the Steve Rothery Band, on keyboards and bass, and Daniele Pomo on drums; Romano also handled the mix, with Miles Showell mastering at Abbey Road. Hackett has warned this isn’t the predictable record two guitarists usually make when they team up, and the two previews back that up: atmosphere outweighs showmanship here.
Mastodon – Marrow Deep
28 August 2026
The Atlanta band return as a quintet, the first time they’ve recorded with this line-up, and with a Josh Homme collaboration. It arrives after a spell of instability for a band that redefined progressive metal with “Leviathan” and “Crack the Skye”, and the change in internal structure is significant enough to justify all the attention.
Crack The Sky – Blessed
Iconoclassic Records · 21 August 2026 (physical release)
Twentieth studio album from a band celebrating fifty years this year and still counting four of its five original members: John Palumbo, Rick Witkowski, and the rhythm section of Joe Macre and Joey D’Amico. Until now it was only available on streaming or on a limited cd-r pressing. Keyboardist Bill Hubauer, of the Neal Morse Band, makes his debut with the band here, and it was recorded with the whole group playing together in the same room. Their 1975 debut was named debut album of the year by Rolling Stone.
Jane Getter Premonition – Transmogrify
7D Media · 10 July 2026
Seven tracks built around the idea of transformation — personal, political and musical — with a line-up that explains on its own why the record matters: Jane Getter on guitar, Adam Holzman on keyboards, Testament’s Alex Skolnick on guitar, Paul Frazier on bass and Gene Lake on drums, with Mark Egan and Chandra Rule as guests. “Little Steps”, an acoustic-guitar piece, pays tribute to Ralph Towner. The title comes from the method: almost every track began life as something else entirely.
What’s Coming
- Ozric Tentacles – Harmonic Mind
18 September 2026 · Kscope Music. Seventeenth studio album, recorded at the members’ own home studios. - The Pineapple Thief – Far and Wide
9 October 2026 · InsideOut Music. The band’s first record for this label, ten years after Gavin Harrison joined. - Amaseffer – When The Lions Leave Their Den
8 October 2026. - Asia – Indigo
6 November 2026 · Frontiers Music. First studio album since “Gravitas” (2014), featuring Geoff Downes, Harry Whitley, John Mitchell and Virgil Donati. - Nine Skies – A Whisper Called Home
20 November 2026.
Text by Guillem Cardós