ONES & ZEROS - VOLUME 0

Listening to this, the new and hotly anticipated 3RDegree album, my first thoughts centered around "Connecting": the band, more aggressive than ever, sings of trolls emerging, not in the high fantasy sense you'd expect from most prog but in the contemporary sense of malicious online hordes more fearsome than the forces of Mordor. Mostly, where Vol. 1 was focused on a parodic, Kafkaesque near future Internet of Things, Vol. 0 - appropriately enough for numerically taking a step back - is a record of the present, of our current technological issues, and from here looking forwards. The lyricism becomes dead serious, but the lyrics, concept, and songs still fail to glitch. And even on this very in-the-now release, the band still finds time for "Olympia", an interesting exploration of relationships with artificial intelligence and the group's fascinating idea of a love song.

Of even greater note are the instrumentals. As mentioned earlier, the band comes charging out of the gate; "Re1nstall_0verture" and "Connecting" form a double whammy of some of their hardest edged material yet, proving quite exhilarating as their sound fleshes out. The tracks, especially the aforementioned three and the suite "Click Away!", prove their best yet. The guitars and keys here are used to their maximum potential, weaving vivid electronic soundscapes, beautiful prog-pop, and driving rock. As the binary switches, 3RDegree has gone into overdrive, crafting another winner.