Progressive RockMetal
TesseracT have signed to Nuclear Blast, who will release “ARC_ONE: Obscura”, a three-song EP, on 5 March. The first taste is “Crucible”, which also opens the record. The British band were previously with Kscope, the label behind “War of Being” (2023). The band co-produced, mixed and mastered the EP with Lewis Johns.
“We’re trying to approach this a little bit differently, in terms of not just dropping a full album. We’re trying to work with how music is consumed in general, but also trying to deliver what we think our fans really want from us: a captivating story and a good concept,” singer Dan Tompkins says in the label’s announcement, which presents the EP as the start of a multimedia project.
The lyrics pick up where “War of Being” left off. That album, Tompkins says, “was very much about ego and the masks that we wear”, and it ended by tearing the mask away. “Crucible” is about erasing yourself to fit in, and one line holds the whole idea: “if I fit, I disappear.”
The tour opens at Irving Plaza in New York on 7 January, with Entheos and Sunborn in support, and takes in eighteen North American dates before closing in Denver on the 31st. The six European shows follow in March: Manchester, the O2 Academy Brixton in London on the 13th, Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Leipzig on the 19th. These are the autumn dates the band postponed in October, when they said “some important elements” of their plans had changed.
There are no Spanish dates.
Text by Guillem Cardós