Animals As Leaders

Presented by curt

Support: Allt

With Animals As Leaders , one of the undoubtedly most virtuosic metal bands of the global rock circus will visit us for four concerts in November 2023. On the occasion of their new, fifth album "Parrhesia", for which fans of the band had to wait six long years, the trio, consisting of the two guitarists Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes as well as drummer Matt Garstka, is finally going on a European tour once again.

It is undeniable and has been confirmed again and again by many professional magazines: Tosin Abasi is one of the most virtuosic guitarists of today. Even Steve Vai, often referred to as the greatest virtuoso in metal in his own right, was moved to state after the release of the self-titled Animals As Leaders debut in 2009, "When I first heard Animals As Leaders, I felt like I was hearing the future of virtuoso heavy guitar playing. Fascinating." That album, which the original self-taught guitarist Tosin Abasi recorded almost single-handedly after the breakup of his metalcore band Reflux, was preceded by studies in jazz and classical guitar. Although the Prosthetic label had offered him the opportunity to record such an album immediately after the Reflex split, Tosin himself found that he was not fit enough for such a solo effort. Yet even then he was considered one of the greatest virtuosos on the seven-, eight- and nine-string guitars built to his specifications and especially for him.

When the debut was finally released, the trade press did veritable verbal somersaults: "As satisfying in its visceral kick as it is in its stunning dexterity," found the U.S. Rolling Stone, for example, and Pitchfork wrote: "Animals As Leaders is a tightrope walk between pure technical virtuosity and actual emotional resonance." What pretty much everyone agreed on: That Abasi manages to tell veritable stories with his purely instrumental music, which knows absolutely no boundaries between progressive metal and fusion, ambient and jazz, Latin, funk and djent, that take on a highly visual form in the listener's mind. A head cinema of impressive intensity and expansive space.

Shortly after the release of his debut, Abasi put together a live band in order to be able to reproduce this unique music on stage - and because he always emphasized that he had never intended to succeed as a solo artist. After a few lineup changes in the early years of Animals As Leaders , the lineup that remains in place today was formed in 2012 by the distinguished guitarist/bassist and studio engineer Javier Reyes and Berklee College of Music alumnus and drummer Matt Gartska . With the following albums "Weightless" (2012), "The Joy of Motion" (2014) and "The Madness of Many" (2016), not only the success expanded (all three albums climbed into the top ten of the U.S. hard rock charts), but above all the sound of Animals As Leaders continued to expand, taking at times electronically infected, then again purely acoustic routes and becoming increasingly complex. Not least due to the also enormously sophisticated polyrhythmic work of Matt Gartska.

The current album "Parrhesia", for which the band took an unusually long time, now marks a return to the band's stylistic origins, so to speak: next to the debut, it is clearly the trio's heaviest work. Both the acoustic and electronic experiments have been scaled back in favor of a highly complex melodic line in a progressive metal framework as broad as possible. Partly responsible for this is longtime studio collaborator and, according to Abasi , "the band's silent fourth member," Periphery guitarist Misha Mansoor.