Instrumental Prog Metal
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Vocal-free progressive metal where the lead guitar (or guitar-synth) carries the melody across long, suite-like instrumentals. Tones lean clean and glassy as often as distorted, with extended-range seven- and eight-string guitars, jazz-fusion chord voicings, tapping, sweep-picked legato runs and odd-meter riffing over fluid, busy drumming. Tempos swing from ambient drift to blistering shred; mood is bright, cinematic and exploratory rather than aggressive, prizing melody, dynamics and harmonic color over riffs-as-weapons.
History
The form descends from 1980s shred and fusion — Joe Satriani and Steve Vai proved a guitar could 'sing' a whole record, while Liquid Tension Experiment (Dream Theater's instrumental side-project, 1998) and Planet X carried it into heavy prog. The modern wave crystallized when Tosin Abasi's Animals as Leaders debuted in 2009 on Prosthetic, fusing eight-string djent with jazz harmony; Cynic's instrumental-leaning 'Focus' (1993) and Texas band Scale the Summit had already pointed the way. A bedroom-producer boom followed via Bandcamp and YouTube — Australia's Plini, Sydney's Sithu Aye, and Cloudkicker (the one-man project of Ben Sharp) self-released acclaimed records, and the Sumerian/Prosthetic axis plus guitar-culture sites like GuitarMessenger spread it worldwide.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Wikipedia: Animals as Leaders
- Plini
- Scale the Summit
- Cloudkicker
- Liquid Tension Experiment
- ProgArchives band/album pages (Plini 'Handmade Cities'
- Scale the Summit 'The Migration')
- Loudersound / Metal Hammer features on instrumental progressive metal and the eight-string guitar scene