50 Best Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Albums Of 2017

How Californian six-piece Artificial Language didn’t become the biggest thing in progressive metal this year will baffle me for the rest of my days. April saw the release of the technical up-and-comers’ acclaimed debut, The Observer: an album which had all the right tools to set the rock scene on fire.

Like many great, experimental records before it, the album is a perfect mix between the accessible and the complex. While The Observer witnesses six musicians in their prime providing swanky technicality in waves – each more mind-boggling than the previous – in inordinately quick fashion, the actual structuring and layouts of the album’s eleven individual songs give it a direct, simple and head-on nature very appealing to a more mainstream audience, not to mention the equally accessible cleans of lead singer Shay Lewis.

The only exception to this comes in the eight-minute grand finale “Turn Off the Pictures”, which, despite its opening seconds sounding disturbingly similar to Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of You”, goes onto be a symphonic trailblazer packed with operatic emotion.

And if this all doesn’t sound as heavenly to you as it does to me, you should get your head checked. With the whole thing clocking in at less than 45 minutes and streaming right now in its entirety on YouTube, there really is no excuse to not give The Observer the hard-earned spin that both it and Artificial Language truly deserve.

Although you might need some towels for when your mind gets blown.