Progressive Rock
Believers Roast / Bad Omen Records · 2 October 2026
“Ancestor’s Song” runs seven minutes thirty-one and is the only track on “October By Name” to pass seven. It arrives at the end of a record of six songs and thirty-three minutes forty-four, and it’s where you hear most clearly that one person played all of it: the vocals stack up in harmonies that arrive in layers rather than blocks, and the rhythm section doesn’t show up until the song is already complete above it. Kavus Torabi explains it himself — the bass goes on last, once all the voices and all the changes are in place — and the record sounds accordingly: a foundation fitted to a song that already existed. It came out on 2 October through Believers Roast and Bad Omen Records.
The album opens from the other end. “Signals Shine”, five sixteen, is the most head-on of the six and starts without preamble, while “In Her Radiance”, six thirty-three, takes the longest to get where it’s going. The two singles sit in between: “Water Into Wine” (four eleven), out on 31 July, is the shortest and most direct thing here, and “My Shameful Namesake” (four two), released on 28 August, is the one place where Torabi’s voice isn’t tucked behind a harmony. “From the Storm”, six eleven, works as a hinge between the two halves, developing without ever pressing.
“Hip To The Jag” (22 May 2020) had ten tracks, “The Banishing” (3 May 2024) has eight and this one has six: the trilogy has been shrinking record by record, and here it stops at thirty-three minutes. By the time the vocal-stacking method has shown what it can do, around the fourth track, there’s no album left. “Ancestor’s Song” survives that because it has room; the other five stay inside a song shape that fits them tightly.
Torabi played with Cardiacs while Tim Smith, who died in 2020, was still there, and he’s been in Gong since 2014, when Daevid Allen brought him in as second guitarist; he’s been the singer since 2015, the year Allen died. His own catalogue already held the EP “Solar Divination” (30 March 2018) and the brief two-track “Heaven’s Sun” (2 June 2023).
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós