MIKE PORTNOY Says DREAM THEATER’s Steel Aspect “Is A Large Half Of The Band’s Success”

When Dream Theater introduced their new report, Parasomnia, followers hoped that one thing particular would come. What they may not have anticipated was simply how heavy the album would change into compared to the band’s newest efforts.

In a current dialog with Dylan Gowan of Banger TV, Portnoy talked about such a renewed depth, and the way the band leaned into their heaviest impulses.

“Yeah, I feel typically folks overlook the significance of the steel aspect to Dream Theater, particularly with me within the band,” Portnoy stated (through Blabbermouth). “It’s a very necessary side. It at all times has been. For those who have a look at the very, very first music from the very first album, in ‘A Fortune In Lies’, I used to be enjoying thrash, double bass, thrash beats proper outta the gate.”

That steel spine has at all times been a part of their DNA, in line with Portnoy, even because the band constructed its status on progressive complexity. “And we’ve at all times had songs like that, whether or not or not it’s ‘The Glass Jail’ or ‘Panic Assault’ or ‘A Nightmare To Bear in mind’. It’s been an enormous a part of the band’s sound, and, to be trustworthy, I feel it’s an enormous a part of the band’s success.”

Portnoy pointed to the band’s capacity to faucet into each the progressive and steel crowds as a key cause for his or her attain and longevity. “There’s quite a lot of prog bands or prog steel bands which can be nonetheless form of underground and nonetheless play smaller reveals or perhaps don’t promote as many information as a result of perhaps they haven’t tapped into the steel aspect.”

“However the truth that the steel aspect is such an enormous, massive a part of our sound, I feel, is what elevates Dream Theater to be the cream of the crop by way of ticket gross sales and report gross sales within the prog universe,” he continued. “I feel it’s that steel aspect that does it. The truth that we may play these massive steel festivals like Aftershock or Louder Than Life or Hellfest or Graspop, the truth that we may pull off gigs like that as a prog steel band speaks loads for that steel aspect.”

Regardless of its heavy tone, Parasomnia wasn’t designed to sound that method — it merely advanced in that path. “And when writing Parasomnia, we simply naturally fell into it,” Portnoy defined. “Perhaps it was the darkish subject material of sleep issues and nightmares and issues like that, perhaps that helped us gravitate in the direction of it.”

For followers questioning how this new materials stacks up in opposition to the band’s earlier work, Portnoy provided a transparent comparability: “If I needed to describe Parasomnia, the album, to anyone, I’d say it form of has the darkness and heaviness of Practice Of Thought with the cinematic method of Scenes From A Reminiscence.”