"WE DIDN'T SEE A FUTURE BEING IN A BAND!"

After they released 2020's Rise Radiant into a world in facing the unknown, Caligula’s Horse began to question their existence as a band. However despite creative uncertainty and line-up changes the Aussie prog rockers persisted to make their heaviest and most ambitious material. Guitarist Sam Vallen tells Prog about Charcoal Grace's black heart.

- Matt Mills

A picture's worth a thousand words. It's a cliché we've all A heard too many times in our lives. However, when the artwork for the new Caligula's Horse album, Charcoal Grace, is compared to that of its 2020 predecessor, Rise Radiant, readers will see everything they need to know about the Aussie prog quartet's last four years.

Rise Radiant's cover was a lavish, colourful painting. Crammed with springtime imagery from deer to flowing water and emerald grass, it was created at a time when, as guitarist Sam Vallen phrases it, the band had "all their ducks in a row". Then the pandemic happened. Now, Charcoal Grace is jet-black; flora and fauna are replaced by a human face distorted and washing away into nothingness.

It's a pretty surefire sign that some morale has been bludgeoned to death.

"It seems like a kind of dark way to begin this conversation but, around 2020 or 2021, we didn't really see a future being in a band," Vallen explains at the start of his video call with Prog. He's talking to us from his home in Brisbane.

"I don't know if you remember, but we saw a tonne of bands break up in that time - obviously, this was not an experience that was unique to us in any way. We had this view from the top of the world, which was immediately cut off into nothing, which is depressing enough, but then we also had this push that a lot of bands had. There was this external motivation to rebook tours six months ahead, make plans that are probably not going to happen. It required all this creative energy and felt like it was for nothing." Before the pandemic, Caligula's Horse were one of the most prolific acts in progressive music. Vallen co-founded it as a project with vocalist Jim Grey in 2011; they released their debut, Moments From Ephemeral City, later the same year and, between that point and 2020, put out new albums within three years of one another.