Progressive Rock
InsideOutMusic · 23 October 2026
HOPE has four titles and two of them take the record: “World Spinning – The Final Curtain”, written in five parts, and “The Gods of Rome”, in seven. In between sit “In a World of Fools”, which was the first advance track, and “Mars & Minerva”. Roine Stolt and keyboard player Lalle Larsson wrote all of it, and the core of “The Gods of Rome” comes from a body of orchestral material Stolt and Larsson started more than a decade ago and that now occupies the closing stretch of the band’s eighteenth studio album.
The digital edition doesn’t respect that architecture. The four compositions arrive split across ten files, and “The Gods of Rome” ends up as five tracks of uneven length: the second part gets a file of its own because it is the one the band put out as an advance single in September. The label’s own track list has four titles and nothing else. Anyone coming to the record through a streaming service will find seven movements cut where the single went.
The credits divide the work in detail. Michael Stolt takes bass and Moog bass; Mirko DeMaio, drums and percussion; Larsson, piano and electric keyboards; Hasse Fröberg is listed on vocals and on electric and acoustic guitars, and Roine Stolt keeps vocals, six- and twelve-string guitars, additional keyboards and percussion.
Stolt himself explains the thinking: “At a certain point in life you arrive at a place where outside opinions matter less, and the process gravitates towards making an album that YOU yourself would LOVE but would perhaps normally not be viewed as a commercial attempt at all.”
The Dolby Atmos and 5.1 mixes are credited to Rich Mouser, and the label presents them as the band’s first. They live in one format, the limited CD plus Blu-ray digipak. The standard CD doesn’t carry them, nor does the gatefold double LP, nor the digital version. On a record built out of long movements, which is precisely the material a surround mix can place, the one technical novelty is reserved for the limited edition and everybody else buys the same stereo as always. HOPE arrives just under eighteen months after LOVE, which came out on 2 May 2025.
Rating: 7.8/10
Text by Guillem Cardós