A New Prog Rock Band You Will Like: The Living

The heavy music scene in 2017 is rife with prog metal bands of all types. But what about prog rock? The question seems especially worth asking in the wake of the death of Steely Dan’s Walter Becker, but was top of the mind for me anyway: not all progressive music needs to be aggro.

A band can be based in rock but still have elements of heaviness and metal, of course, and that’s exactly what The Living are. The San Francisco outfit is getting set to release their debut, but already they’ve received praised from Decibel, Pop Matters and others, no small feat. They caught my ear on first listen, too; their music lives and breathes — no click tracks or endless layers of guitars here — just a real rock band kicking out the jams. The truth is they’re not even all that proggy — the music itself is relatively straight-forward — but they do experiment with some atypical arrangements and longer song structures. Think somewhere between Royal Thunder, Pink Floyd and Foo Fighters… if that makes any sense at all.

The Living have released three songs from their upcoming self-titled album, so I’ll embed those all for you below; pre-order the album here before its September 22nd release.