✦✦✦✧ Punchy and radio-friendly prog metal? Yes please! This is Soen sounding more than ever before like Porcupine Tree (or unlike Tool). The previous comparisons to Leprous still hold firm, only this music has more swagger. Interesting and fun!

✦✦✦✧ This is an intriguing effort at accessibility, from a famously polymathic prog band who have been compared in the past to Tool, Opeth, and Leprous. While those touchstones are still discernible, Imperial finds the Swedes at last sounding more like their own thing than their influences. The only criticism I’ve got is that there’s maybe a little too much polish and sanding down of the rough edges (but that’s fairly typical of any prog band who tries to resonate with an audience, it seems).

✦✦✦✧ This is some very good prog metal. The band’s early influences-on-their-sleeves approach is more subdued here (although you can still hear glimmers of Tool, Opeth, and even latter-day Pink Floyd in the mix), and the result is patient yet plaintive, and more surefooted than ever. My main complaint? It’s a hard kind of music to get excited about.

✦✦✦✧ You’ll find haunting hybridizations here of Tool, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Karnivool, and Leprous… with plenty of hints of folk, indie, and ambient rock thrown in for good measure. The band is doubling down on emotionality here, focusing on sublimely excellent songcraft, but at the expense of any overt signs of self-indulgence.

★★★★ This is the most emotionally complete prog metal album of the year. As was the case with the band’s debut album, Soen continue to wear their Tool and APC influences on their sleeves with this followup. But the overall sound is more nuanced now, more fleshed out and dynamic. (You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a lost Opeth album, in fact.)