May 2026 Featured Release - The Infinite Edition

This months Infinite feature release is gonna be the UK progressive band Ihlo's 2nd full length studio album, Legacy. Let us know what you think!

https://ihlo.bandcamp.com/album/legacy

https://open.spotify.com/album/5NUdlbnnInX0rQMZ55s4cp

I've done my review, here's its summary:

The first time I heard this band was when I was listening to a song from their debut Union in an Infinite playlist 6 months before this review. I thought the song was a nice stylistic homage to Periphery from start to finish. And now I can say the same about their new album Legacy! They're a new addition to the melodic modern progressive metal league of Leprous, Haken, The Contortionist, and Tesseract. It took 5 years for this British progressive metal/rock band to make this follow-up to 2019's Union. Part of the delay was due to the hardships of the COVID lockdowns. But now they're here to deliver us this progressive offering. You can really hear both the production and talent from the two key members of the band; guitarist Phil Monro and vocalist Andy Robison. They, along with the other members, work together to craft complex structures in which ambience turns into metal grace, from decent-length 5-minute tracks to long epics. This beautiful album Legacy has all the melody and power you can get. Well, maybe a slight more metal heaviness would be ideal, but that's OK. I look forward to what path they would take. The modern progressive metal/rock shaped up by VOLA and BTBAM is in the good hands of these young British lads!

4.5/5

I checked this out this afternoon and quite enjoyed it. There is a nice, restrained use of synths and they never smother things with excessive layers. Andy Robinson has quite a high-pitched voice, a little like Claudio Sanchez of Coheed and Cambria, but the guy still conveys a fair bit of emotion through his vocals. It works best for me at its most gentle-sounding, with the closing duo of the title track and "Signal" being the stand outs and sending me off with a warm fuzzy feeling about the album as a whole. The songwriting is mature and complex and they handle any transitions from light to heavy passages quite nicely but, in common with a number of modern prog metal bands, I wonder why their only resource when it comes to the heavier sections is that 'bouncy', djent-y sound. I went into this without any prior expectations, never having heard of the band before and came away being very pleasantly surprised. I can definitely see me coming back to this.

4/5