(In this opinion piece Andy Synn offers some thoughts about what it should really mean to be a “progressive” band — and about when the label is just a cover-up for a band’s failure to establish its own identity.)

Let me start off by saying something controversial…

Prog ≠ Progressive

These days the term ‘Prog’ is thrown around so much it’s lost almost all meaning. It’s become a go-to word for bands afraid to admit to their real genre. The worst offender these days is djent, where every other band now describes themselves as “Progressive Metal”, when what they really mean is “Axe-FX polyrhythms, spacey keyboards, and shreddy directionless guitars”, but it’s not the only one. We now have “Progressive Deathcore”, “Progressive Thrash”, and about a billion other genres carelessly welding the “progressive” tag onto themselves in the hope of wallpapering over the cracks in their identity.

I’d even go so far as to say that “Prog” itself is its own genre nowadays, and more than just a qualifier for other genres. My father is an avid reader of Prog Rock magazine, and I take the opportunity to read it whenever I visit the family home. It’s an interesting magazine, trying to keep up with the old-school originators of the “Prog” sound, as well as expose new bands to an interested audience. But I’d say that a lot of the bands featured in its pages aren’t really “Progressive”. There’s too much commonality, too many shared influences and sounds, for that. They’re “Prog” as defined by the boundaries of genre and style, just as “Death”, “Black” and “Hardcore” are defined. Continue reading »