Hear East of the Wall Unleash Melodic Prog-Metal Maelstrom on Wild New Song

Hailing from Central New Jersey, East of the Wall is a long-running project that always balanced acrobatic instrumentation with a understanding of songwriting – a rare combination to be sure. Now approaching their fifth LP (sixth if you count a three-way with Rosetta and Year of No Light), the prog-leaning band is pushing the melodic vocals to the forefront, yet still leaning in on their jaw-dropping musicianship that recall bands like Cynic, Intronaut, Animals as Leaders and more. Their latest effort is NP-Complete for Translation Loss, due on March 29th (order yours) and the first single is the terrifyingly named "Fast-Bang Pooper Doop," a track that follows in the band's long-running melodic-leaning prog-metal tradition. Stream it above for the first time.

Guitarist Chris Alfano offered a bit of background on the new track, describing it as such: "'Pooper' is a bit of a compositional anomaly for us, but not a total outlier. Most of our songs are hashed out in the room — if one of us brings in a more fleshed out idea, it's usually two riffs — nothing you would call fully realized. But for this one, Matt had all of the main riffs, the sequence, and even the multi-guitar arrangement for the ending (the heavy riff plus the clean harmonies) planned. Plus, when it came time to write the vocals, he came up with those melodies as well for the most part (usually Greg writes his own parts). The rest of the band contributed more harmonies, a few counterpoints, plus the bass and drums obviously. But for this most part, this song came from one person. There's some precedent for that though: many of our albums tend to have 'Matt's short banger.' In the past, those were two-minute instrumentals ("Mud Button" on our Rosetta/Year of No Light split, "Running Tab of Sweetness" off The Apologist, or the title track of Redaction Artifacts which is basically the same concept but inverted: a quick sleeper instead of a banger). So this is that idea applied to a brief pop song...or, the closest thing to a pop song you get with our band."