Band:	Leprous
Album:	Melodies Of Atonement
Style:	Progressive metal
Release date:	August 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Silently Walking Alone
02. Atonement
03. My Specter
04. I Hear The Sirens
05. Like A Sunken Ship
06. Limbo
07. Faceless
08. Starlight
09. Self-Satisfied Lullaby
10. Unfree My Soul

The trajectory of Leprous’s musical evolution across the 2010s was fast and far-reaching, with Pitfalls a long way away stylistically from Bilateral. With their two albums so far this decade, the Norwegians have slowed down this evolution, and taken stock over the territory they’ve traversed thus far.

The progression of Leprous has already been discussed plenty by this point: the one-time frenetic prog-metal band first dialled down their chaotic energy, then utilized their complex rhythmicity within more accessible songs, before largely eschewing metal altogether on 2019’s Pitfalls in favour of art rock/pop, electronic and even hip-hop influences. On a line where the band’s first five albums were points 1 thru 5, Pitfalls felt like point 8; their next record, Aphelion, had more of a rock focus, placing it somewhere in between Pitfalls and its predecessor, Malina, and Melodies Of Atonement, while continuing the exploration of influences that emerged on that pivotal 2019 record, furthers the re-integration of rock/metal into their sound.

I’m not sure whether or not I would entirely call Melodies Of Atonement a prog-metal album, but while it’s perhaps not true that a majority of the album's runtime features metallic sounds, nearly the whole tracklist features metallic moments that exceed the overarching heaviness levels of the previous two releases. This may be encouraging news to recently disgruntled fans of the band; personally, while I struggled to click with a lot of Pitfalls, Aphelion appealed to me not just due to an increased rock presence, but a general likability to the songwriting, so while I’m not complaining at a more metallic approach, it’s not significantly influencing my opinion of this new album.

What is that opinion, though? Overall, it’s a positive one; Leprous continue to explore the fusion of subtle technical and rhythmic complexity with sophisticated yet accessible melodicism, while balancing the guitar-based band arrangement with healthy use of electronics across a wide dynamic range. Opening track “Silently Walking Alone” has a strong presence of throbbing synths intriguingly syncopating with steady drum rhythms, in a manner that reminds me a bit of moments on Pain Of Salvation’s Panther, while bringing an extra heaviness to the chorus. It’s a strong opening to the album, and has come to be one of my highlights of Melodies Of Atonement.

The contrast of electronic-oriented verses with crunching metallic choruses is expanded upon with the following track, “Atonement”, whose understated trip-hop verse textures would have slotted nicely onto Pitfalls, but whose choruses then proceed to jump out of the speakers with unexpected intensity to the distorted polyrhythms. Another track whose verse rhythms catch one’s attention is “Limbo”; anyone familiar with their song “I Lose Hope” will pick up on similar vibes to the rhythm section and eerie tones during the verse of “Limbo”. While this track has a nice hooky chorus, it is during the tense build in the latter half of the song (which reminds me of another recent Leprous track, “Running Low”) that it reaches a pinnacle musically.

Most songs feature some kind of switch between softer electronics-based and heavier distorted passages, but several of them eschew simple verse/chorus trade-offs, and also the nature of the band’s understatedness and loudness vary. Einar Solberg’s penchant for airy, tender, quietly angelic singing is explored throughout the first half of the spacey “I Hear The Sirens”, and there’s a sedate grandeur to the slow-paced grandiose chorus of the song, which is elongated and evolved over a prolonged stretch of time. A song that is primed to take listeners by surprise is “Like A Sunken Ship”; for a long stretch from its start, it is dynamically muted, slowly shuffling forward to sleepwalking rhythms before suddenly exploding with first crunching distortion and then the sudden unleashing of full-blooded harsh vocal roars.

I’ve spent a few paragraphs talking about the dynamics and structure of songs without really going into my enjoyment of them, and part of that is that I’m still a bit undecided. There’s a very ‘sophisticated’, at-times arguably navel-gazing songwriting attitude that’s been particularly pervasive in the band’s writing since Pitfalls, and to be totally honest, there’s elements to it, particularly in having such muted and almost seemingly directionless prolonged openings back-to-back in “I Hear The Sirens” and “Like A Sunken Ship”, that frustrate me more than engage. I’m also generally struggling to find songs here with the same memorability and excitement factor that a lot of the tracks of Aphelion had. One song that does stick in my memory, but not necessarily for the right reasons, is “Self Satisfied Lullaby”, whose saccharine central choral refrain I find to be somewhat irritating.

But all of that is not to say that there’s not plenty of things I appreciate or enjoy on Melodies Of Atonement. Leprous as a collective have an instrumental style and aptitude that is uniquely their own and inherently gripping to listen to, and that means that even a track as difficult to click with at times as “Self Satisfied Lullaby” can have a really enjoyable instrumental climax driven by Tor Suhrke’s delightful rhythmic and melodic guitarwork. The songs “Faceless” and “Starlight” are also good vehicles for Leprous as a sophisti-prog band, particularly the former with the way that it grows in its final few minutes. Finally, while “Unfree My Soul” doesn’t repeat the prog extravagance of the previous two records’ closing songs, it has a satisfying emotional intensity to Solberg’s powerful chorus refrain that only grows with each repetition.

Melodies Of Atonement is a really interesting approach from Leprous at recontextualizing metal within their current highbrow art rock sound without feeling like a musical regression. Overall, I enjoy the album’s sound and really appreciate the band's undeniable artistry; however, in term of likability on a song-by-song basis, I feel it perhaps falls just a fraction short of Aphelion.