The 25 or so people gathered in the Cellar Bar in Bracknell, Berkshire on a cold October night in 2007 could be forgiven for not recognising the significance of what they were witnessing. Onstage, five men in their early 20s were blasting out a thrashy if geometrically complex noise that couldn’t quite conceal its debt to Meshuggah. The name on the flyers was ‘Tesseract’, a moniker that evoked hard-to-grasp concepts of four-dimensional mathematics, and this was their very first gig.
“We were a lot more raw and raucous back then,” says guitarist Acle Kahney, who had conceived Tesseract as a one-man project in the bedroom of his mum’s house in Milton Keynes four years earlier in 2003. “I was headbanging all over the place. Now I just think, ‘I can’t move like that any more ’cos I’ll probably make a mess of it all.’”
It’s 16 years since that first show, and 20 since the teenage Acle started creating music under that name. Tesseract have long since outgrown the Cellar Bar in Bracknell to become one of the most influential British metal bands of the 21st century. The tech-metal sound they popularised alongside US counterparts Periphery and Animals As Leaders has grown from a cult concern beloved by YouTube guitar geeks to something embedded deep in the DNA of modern metal – it can be heard in the music of everyone from Sleep Token and Spiritbox to Architects and even Within Temptation, whose upcoming album Bleed Out borders on djent at times. All modern metal has a tech edge, it seems.
Yet Tesseract themselves have constantly stayed ahead of the game, challenging themselves to push forward at every step. Their fifth album, goes further than ever before. Across nine songs that veer from the weighty and intricate (the 11-minute title track) to the melodic and emotional (the soaring it tells
