US prog rockers Glass Hammer have announced a new singer and their very first NFT drop.
The band are hard at work on the follow-up to last year's Dreaming City which will expand further on the album's concept. They are joined on the new album by vocalist Hannah Pyror who first featured on the digital Matter Of Time album released in December 2020.
"Production of Glass Hammer's follow-up to Dreaming City is underway," says bassist and vocalist Steve Babb. "This will be Part II of a trilogy. Songs are still being written and rewritten, tracks are being recorded, demos obsessed over—you get the picture. The album is tentatively titled Skallagrim – At The Gates Of Deception."
At the same time the band are teasing the new album by entering using NFTs. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique files that live on a digital ledger called a blockchain and are able to verify ownership of a work of digital art (although not full ownership). Buyers can display the digital artwork they represent and may be able to resell later.
Ten Glass Hammer NFT's will be minted of a pre-release mix of the track Anthem To Andorath, which features Hannah Pryor as lead vocalist.
"Only ten of these will ever be released," explains Babb. "The song will show up on the album, of course, but not in this form. The purchasers will find their names listed in the credits of our new album, and there may be other goodies attached as well. We're really just learning about NFTs, but they're very interesting as a new way to sell music, not only to crypto-collectors who may have never heard of Glass Hammer but to prog-rock collectors and superfans who'd like to own something truly exclusive."
Glass Hammer is not new to the notion of exclusive collectibles. Babb adds, "Our very first album (1993's Journey Of The Dunadan) was first sold as a collectible—a limited edition art print and a gold foil CD on QVC, giving us a massive amount of exposure early on. Though I think it's too early to say whether or not NFTs will change the music business, it still makes sense for Glass Hammer to make our music available wherever it can be sold."
Roger Dean was the first person in the prog world to utilise the new NFT technology when he released a digital pack featuring limited editions of three exclusive digital art pieces, each a component of his new Allurium series, in collaboration with NFT studio THE MTAPHR.
