(Andy Synn has been a fan of this band for a long, long time… but is he a fan of their new album?)
There’s a commonly quoted, but often misinterpreted, maxim which states that as you grow older there comes a time when you must “put away childish things.”
What it actually means is that the process of becoming an adult means growing beyond selfishness and short-sighted, self-serving impulsivity to consider the people and the world around you… but it’s often taken as a claim that one should give up the things you enjoy, your passions, your hobbies, your interests, in order to display some sort of boring, performative “maturity”.
It’s a sentiment that afflicts a lot of bands too, especially when they suddenly decide to throw in an unnecessary ballad or some generically pretentious prog-parts as a signal to their audience that they’ve finally “grown up”.
Luckily for all of us, however, as much as Canadian genre-splicing jesters Protest the Hero have grown and developed over the years I’m happy to report that they still possess that same shamelessly nerdy, Theatre-Kid Pop-Punk meets Dream Theatre-loving, DnD-playing, Power-Prog energy now as they did way back before they could even grow some proper beards.
