You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

It takes two or three tracks to get into what this South Wales band are trying to achieve, but once it coalesces, you start to let the impact wash across your senses.

Prosperina showed on 2012 debut Faith To Sleep that they had the capacity to tread a line between Hawkwind, Soundgarden and Kyuss, and they continue directly along this path here. There are times, as on the fermenting crush of Codes, when they slip into a more obvious stoner attack. And there are other occasions, such as Proles or Graveyard Of Ambition, when the space-rock continuum becomes the band’s alternative universe.

However, the usual approach is to meld all their influences into something that’s individual to this band. You can hear it to fine effect on Here Lie The Ruins and Sgwd Henrhyd. Both stand at the crossroads between prog, stoner and grunge music, and in doing so come up with a warm, informed style that’s both epic yet also intimate. Prosperina are a band on the verge of making a spectacular album, and they’re getting close./o:p

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.