Riverside - "ID.Entity": Polish prog veterans have a new album

 When Riverside released their seventh album, Wasteland, in 2018, they did so under a veil of mourning. The Polish band’s first proper release since guitarist and founding member Piotr Grudzirfski died two years earlier. Wasteland was their darkest album to that point. Its central concept of survivors trying to stay alive in a wrecked, desolate post-apocalyptic world was a thinly veiled allegory for the band’s own loss. The sense of hollowness that shrouded Wasteland reflected a band still wrestling with bereavement as they embarked on a journey towards healing.

Almost five years later, this follow-up suggests they’re somewhere near their destination. ID.Entity is the antithesis of its predecessor. From the instant a smattering of 80s-dappled keyboards fizz into life on opener Friend Or Foe, it’s bathed in a brightness that perfectly counterbalances the wrangled emotions that ran through Wasteland. With frontman Mariusz Duda’s voice keening and swooping, in places it sounds very much like A-ha gone prog.

Where Wasteland was an unabashed guitar album, the use of that instrument is scaled back here. Instead, it’s the gorgeously glassy bass tones of Duda and keyboardist Michal Lapaj’s hooky, occasionally quirky work that drives these songs. Duda has long said his first love was always electronic and ambient music, and it’s something that’s evident in his sonic experimentations with solo project Lunatic Soul. That approach also appears to have seeped into Riverside’s DNA this time around, evidenced in the nuanced production of I’m Done With You and the delicate textural interchanges of The Place Where I Belong.

Lyrically, ID.Entity finds Duda questioning both himself and the world around him with virtue and venom. Friend Or Foe reads like an open letter to himself as he asks, 'How much of yourself is left in you?’, while Big Tech Brother holds a mirror up to the dystopian culture in which we live, where humans are 'parsed’, 'modified’ and ‘monetised’ by tyrannical corporations, while wondering if it has to be this way. Although Duda’s lyrics are full of questions, they play like he already has the answers. Not all of it works, though - musical worth aside, The Place Where I Belong’s swipe at pop philosophers is, at points, as cringey as being in a conversation with one in real life.

Riverside may have reshaped their sound, but they’re still recognisable as the band who made Second Life Syndrome and Love, Fear And The Time Machine. Here, Landmine Blast delivers punchy prog metal with sumptuous melodies, while Big Tech Brother weaves jagged bass lines backed with biting, syncopated synth brass, gothic prog-doom and hook-harnessed refrains into a wildly diverse yet cohesive seven and a half minutes. It’s a song, too, that benefits from authentically executed pop sensibilities. Yet its progressive indulgences are balanced with a keen melodic impulse and the urge to deliver as many earworms as possible. For that, Lapaj must take some of the credit. His influence has given the record much of its A-ha-adjacent 80s edge. Once written off as 80s pretty boys, the Norwegian trio’s reputation has grown in recent years, not least within prog circles. Ihsahn, who teamed up with Leprous vocalist Einar Solberg for a cover of Manhattan Skyline in 2020, has labelled them as “pioneers”, with Green Carnation also among their admirers. Riverside clearly think along the same lines - A-ha’s brand of sophisticated, widescreen grandeur is all over ID.Entity.

Over the years. Riverside have embraced a far wider palette than the prog metal focus of their early days and, as Friend Or Foe proves with delightful pomp, they’ve now cast their net wider still. Oscillating and popping keyboards coalesce with Duda’s intelligently hip-swinging bassline while light, colourful motifs sway in and out of the fray throughout. That sparring between the band’s intrinsic sound and exciting new textures glitters the entire album. Self-Aware is effortlessly uplifting, the unmistakable skeleton of a Riverside song adorned with new robes in the form of dancing synths, disco and even a hint of ska. Yet at no point does this not sound like a Riverside album. Keeping that identity feels vital and is one of the record’s greatest assets.

It’s fitting that this album centres on the questioning of identities. After everything this group have been through, both together and through self-driven musical adventures, they’ve never sounded as self-assured as here. ID.Entity’s seven lovingly sculpted tracks represent a rejuvenated band able to bring fresh ideas to the table without compromising what made Riverside so likeable in the first place. It makes for a strong, brilliantly unapologetic record.