Riverside have announced their first full-length studio album in almost five years. The Warsaw-based four-piece will release ID.Entity through InsideOut on January 20, 2023 – watch the video for first single, I'm Done With You below.
"[The song] is about an anger and frustration!" says mainmain Mariusz Duda. “We live in times of anger and helplessness. In times dominated by big tech, populists, conspiracy theories, hatred, greedy corporations causing the planet and the human nature to die at an accelerated speed. We live in times when one country can attack another out of the blue just because they think they are more deserving of something. These days it's simply hard to sing only about love, friendship and escapes into imaginary worlds."
But that's not the only track that revisits the energy and aggression that defined their 2000s output.
“I wanted to go back to that sound a little bit,” Duda tells Prog, “but mostly I wanted to go back to the sound that Riverside can achieve when we play live shows. Riverside live has more balls, and what defines us is the interaction between us and the audience: we’ve always forced people to sing, interact and clap.”
Riverside debuted back in September 2004 with Out Of Myself, which helped to make the band a cornerstone act of the then-nascent progressive rock revival, with its theatrical keys, maximalist songwriting and metal-inspired riffing. Nine years later, fifth album Shrine Of New Generation Slaves saw them veer in a more moody and melody-driven direction, which they maintained on Love, Fear And The Time Machine (2015) and Wasteland (2018).
According to Duda, the return to Riverside’s heavier roots came from them writing in their rehearsal space again. “The first four albums that we recorded, we were working together in the rehearsal room,” he explains. “With the three previous albums from the second decade, the material was mostly in the studio.
“With the new material, I want it to go back to those times when we’ve been more together. That was my challenge for the beginning of the third decade: Riverside combining the beginnings with the second decade, where we made more mature material, in my opinion.”
Duda began writing ID.Entity while on the tour for Wasteland. He took a break during the pandemic to focus on making his trilogy of solo albums, then returned to composing for Riverside in October 2021, the same month that the band released the single, Story Of My Dream. However, that track won’t reappear on the new record. “For me, a new album is always a new chapter,” Duda explains.
ID.Entity was tracked and mixed at Boogie Town Studio, Otwock, and Serakos Studio, Warsaw, in spring and summer this year. It is the first album recorded with Maciej Meller as Riverside’s full-time guitarist. Meller was previously a touring member of the band and played a handful of solos on Wasteland. He now replaces Piotr Grudzinski, who died in 2016, aged just 40.
Lyrically, ID.Entity sees Duda questioning his own place in the world and, also, Riverside’s place in the prog scene. “When I started to write,” he recalls, “the first questions were: ‘Who am I? How do I feel within myself? How about the identity of the band? Who are we?’
“Even if we try to deliver a totally different kind of music, we’ll always be in the prog community. The Spotify algorithm put us there, so there are questions in the lyrics about this algorithm. At the beginning of the album is the line: ‘Who are you pretending to be now?’”
There are, he says, also wider political themes on their record. “We live in really uncertain and trying times. We had lockdowns, now we have a war across the border [in Ukraine]. Plus, we live in a polarised society: extreme left, extreme right, and nothing in between. I had to mention something about that in the lyrics.”
ID.Entity will be available in standard CD and digital formats as well as limited edition deluxe 2CD+Blu-ray Artbook, limited edition 2CD Mediabook and coloured vinyl. Riverside will play at Prognosis Festival in the UK and Netherlands in 2023.
Watch the new video for I'm Done With You below.
Tracklisting
1. Friend or Foe?
2. Landmine Blast
3. Big Tech Brother
4. Post-Truth
5. The Place Where I Belong
6. I'm Done With You
7. Self-Aware
Bonus tracks (deluxe versions only)
8. Age of Anger (Instrumental)
9. Together Again (Instrumental)
10. Friend or Foe? (Single Edit)
11. Self-Aware (Single Edit)
