Band:	Frogg
Album:	Eclipse
Style:	Technical death metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	March 07, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. Walpurgisnacht
02. Life Zero
03. Dandelion
04. Eclipse I: Blind Bakunawa
05. Eclipse II: Sickened By Silence
06. Interspecific Hybrid Species
07. Wake Up
08. Sun Stealer
09. Double Vision Roll
10. Omni Trigger

There’s some frogs out there with oddly long fingers, evolved to offer them various advantages in the wild. However, it wasn’t until 2025 that the true reason for this evolutionary path was discovered; it turns out that Froggs are shredding fiends on the guitar.

Existing in some form or another since 2009, it was a decade later before Sky Moon Clark (also of The Mantle) started to seriously pursue Frogg as a project, initially with session musicians but with permanent members gradually joining the fold. The first meaningful release from the band was 2020 EP A Reptilian Dystopia (someone might want to check Clark knows frogs are amphibians), but it took another 5 years afterwards to create and release the band’s full-length debut, Eclipse, a dizzying display of technical proficiency.

With a surfeit of extremity, virtuosity and complexity, Eclipse is firmly entrenched in the world of tech-death, but also has a strong prog current running through it, as well as occasional metalcore stylings. The easiest band to compare them with is Between The Buried And Me, specifically thinking of the Alaska/Colors era in terms of intensity; the similarities are perhaps most blatant on the song “Sun Stealer”, the chop-changing rhythms, brutal foundations and elaborate lead guitar meanderings of which will make fans of BTBAM feel right at home.

Frogg aren’t a direct copycat of that group, however; there’s a greater constant emphasis on lead guitar pyrotechnics that exceed what BTBAM are generally about, and there’s also hints of acts such as Obscura, The Faceless and Protest The Hero in the album’s fabric. An influence that is both subtler and more pervasive is that of Cynic; it only creeps through on occasion, but between the deft clean touches in the background of “Dandelion”, the blink-and-you-miss-it vocoder moment during “Eclipse I: Blind Bakunawa” and quirky melodic hints in latter portions of “Interspecific Hybrid Species”, the Floridian band’s presence is felt.

Eclipse is a tricky album to have too much of a song-by-song dive into, because the formula, or what there is of one, is pretty consistent between tracks: at any given moment, you can expect guitar solos and duets to be shredding all over the place, injecting welcome melody in contrast to the tech-death aggression of the riffs, the erratic chaos of the polyrhythms and mathcore moments, and the density of the occasional beatdown riffs. Songs rarely dwell on any particular idea for long, transitioning from one section to the next with loose abandon, but while listening to the album can be overwhelming and occasionally disorienting, things largely make relative sense, and the ability to throw in likeable hooks within the madness holds the record back from descending into cacophony.

Still, the occasional changes in pace do offer welcome relief when they arrive. Before the onslaught of Between The Buried And Me-esque chaos, “Sun Stealer” has a minute of quiet, eerie atmosphere introducing the song; only “Eclipse II: Sickened By Silence” and its Omnivium-style acoustics offer a similarly calm beginning to a track. That song subsequently moves into increasingly brutish tech-death extremity, but changes gear radically midway through, conjuring up clean guitar reminiscent of Rush as a foundation for neat melodic shredding.

The vast majority of vocals on the record are Clark’s harsh roars, but “Eclipse II: Sickened By Silence” and “Omni Trigger” feature faint background clean singing in brief passages that adds nice atmosphere and texturing, channeling a touch of Fallujah in the latter instance. Still, it is the one song where clean vocals take on a lead role that is the most distinctive one on the record, for better or worse. “Wake Up” initially kicks off much like the rest of the tracklist with aggression and chaos, but a lighter edge is provided by recurring Frogg guest Emma Rae’s keytar, before she takes over the song completely in its melodic chorus. It’s a radical change of tone, resembling Dance Gavin Dance and similar acts as much as it does any of the other reference points used for the rest of the album; personally, while I don’t mind the song’s chorus, it does feel quite disconnected from the rest of Eclipse, and isn’t really enjoyable enough to make up for this jarring feeling.

It is a bit of a shame that the most naturally hooky part of the album has this degree of awkwardness to it, as memorability is one area in which Frogg could improve; the complexity for complexity’s sake makes it hard for much of Eclipse to leave a firm lasting impression. Nevertheless, the skill on display here is admirable, and Eclipse is quite the blast while it is playing.