When your band haven’t released a studio album for five years, it feels like a very bold statement to return with an 11-minute prog metal epic. If that wasn’t sufficiently daring, TesseracT’s War Of Being – the title track from their latest album – is accompanied by a high-concept video in which the idea of inner struggle is expressed through a futuristic samurai battling their doppelgänger. It’s nothing if not a gamble.
“Every band must have those discussions: what’s going to be the most successful song to release first?” says frontman Daniel Tompkins. “The last album [2018’s Sonder] was relatively short for us. I felt like I’d seen enough feedback to know people were left a little bit dissatisfied, so I thought it would be a real unexpected thing to release an 11-minute track as the first single. Rather than releasing a song that’s just going to appeal to a wider audience, we wanted to honour the core fanbase that has stuck by us for the past 15 or so years. For me, this is really a song for the fans.”
