Progressive Rock
February 2026
“Promises” opens the EP at nine minutes and three seconds and closes it again at six thirty-seven, stripped back to an acoustic: two of the four tracks on Holy Books & Credit Cards 1: Promises are the same song. Also Eden formed in the south-west of England in 2005 and hadn’t put out anything new since Redacted (2013), so the comeback amounts to thirty-three minutes and a warning that this is only the first instalment: a second, “2: Waves”, landed on 31 August.
The line-up is the one the band has held for the past decade: Ian Hodson on keyboards, Huw Lloyd-Jones on vocals, Simon Rogers on guitars, Graham Lane on bass and Guy Monk on drums, with Jessi Stephens on backing vocals here and there. It all falls into place on “A Painter’s Hands” (7:10), built on acoustic guitar and very open keyboards, with Lloyd-Jones’s baritone sitting in the middle and nothing chasing it: folk-prog ground Also Eden have rarely worked, and by some distance the emotional centre of the EP.
“Scented Candle Corridors” (10:25) is the long piece and the place where the band shows what it can do: it starts low, gathers atmosphere and ends up somewhere much larger, with Hodson’s keyboards and Rogers’s guitar sharing the weight rather than fighting over it. The vocabulary is standard British neo-prog — IQ, Marillion, Pendragon, early Genesis — and nobody is pretending otherwise, but the phrasing doesn’t sound like a museum piece: the transitions belong to now, not to 1984.
Thirty-three minutes for thirteen years of silence is thin enough, and one minute in every five of this record is the acoustic restatement of the opening song. The stripped version is well done and proves the melody stands up without the arrangement, which is no small thing; the trouble is that it takes the place of a fourth new song on a release that already bills itself as a fragment of something larger. In new music, anyone who waited thirteen years for Also Eden gets twenty-six minutes and thirty-eight seconds.
Four tracks and thirty-three minutes, out in February 2026 and sold through Bandcamp. The Holy Books & Credit Cards series is a trilogy of EPs spread across the same year.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Guillem Cardós