Advent Horizon is a young, American progressive rock band hailing from Salt Lake City, Utah. Their first three records saw them gain some traction in the prog scene, but with their fourth record, Falling Together, Advent Horizon expands their sound and scope and releases what will surely be considered one of the best prog records of the year. Frontman Rylee McDonald recently took some time to talk about the new record.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Advent Horizon interview –
On the history of the band – So we started out when I was in high school. My drummer and I have been buddies since we were 14, 15 years old, and we bonded over a mutual obsession for Rush. So, we spent our high school career learning Rush songs, and at a certain point we realized, “Hey, we should actually make our own music.” Thus, Advent Horizon was born.
There’ve been many lineups over the years. We’ve had a couple different bass players, a couple of different utility guitar players, but the current lineup of the band has been solid since 2015 now. So, it’s been quite a while. There’s myself on vocals, guitar, songwriting, all that stuff; our drummer, Mike Lofgreen; our bass player, Casen Wood, who also plays keys quite a bit on the new album; and then we have Grant Mathison, who is our utility guy. He does all the guitars, all the vocals, lots of key stuff that we need him to do. Then very recently, over the last six months, actually, over the last couple of years, my wife has kind of gradually become a member of the band. I don’t know that there was any one point where we officially said, “Hey, will you join?” It’s more of just we realized over the last several years that we need someone with a higher voice than mine, and she has a gorgeous voice. I met her through music. We met at an open mic. I’ve always been in love with her voice, and so it was a natural choice to just have her join the fold. Yeah that’s the lineup now, is the five of us.
On the band’s growth leading to Falling Together – As songwriters, when we’re writing music at least I, this is the way I am, when I’m writing something, I will play one guitar part on my guitar as I’m writing it, but what I hear in my head is a whole symphony of other sounds surrounding that guitar part. The pursuit of creating that symphony of sounds in real life is this everlasting battle as an artist that we are all striving to achieve. I definitely feel like we’ve found it with this album. A big part of that is the growth that we’ve had over our last several albums, especially the period over the last three or four years with A Cell to Call Home. We learned a lot from that album.
Yeah I knew with that album, with Cell to Call Home, that we had accomplished something beautiful, but I also knew when we released it, “Okay, I have I have this vision in my head of exactly where I want to take Advent Horizon next,” and we achieved it. So long answer for a short question, yes, I think we did it.
On if there was internal debate over starting the record with a 19-minute epic – There most certainly was. We have a Discord channel with the band, so like a Discord chat group. There’s the band and then a close circle of the friends and family that surround us whose opinions we trust. There was a debate for a couple of days that was many, pages that you could scroll through of us going back and forth about “Ah, Rush did it with 2112. Why can’t we do it?” But then also “Ah, but are we gonna scare people away when they see that the first track is 19 minutes? Is it gonna turn people off to it?” Ultimately, what we ended up deciding was that our job as the band isn’t necessarily to try to conform to any one preset structure that has been successful in the world. We should do what feels best to us as artists, because ultimately that’s where we’ve seen the most success.
When we stop thinking too hard about what is everybody else gonna think and just write the music that speaks to us and present our music in a way that makes sense to us people receive it best. Because I think listeners are smart enough to know when something is genuine and when a band is excited about something that they’re doing. While I am extremely proud of every song on this new album; there is no song that to me shows our excitement and our passion for prog music than that first track. So yeah, ultimately it won out and we did the 2112 thing, release a 19-minute song. That first song kind of introduces all the themes of the album, and then each song after it is taking a smaller idea that was introduced within the first track and expanding upon it.
On the lyrics chronicling his personal faith journey – Most definitely, yeah. It was not originally by design. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write about when I started writing the songs for this album. I just knew that I wanted…I knew what I wanted the album to sound like. I didn’t know what I wanted the subject matter of it to be. As I started writing lyrics, the lyrics all, this is a common thing as a lyricist, you write about what is going on in your life. It’s just how it works. Over the last five, six years, my wife and I have, we’ve had this mutual journey away from our upbringing, away from the religion and culture that we were born into, Anybody who’s gone through that knows it is exciting, it’s terrifying, it makes you reexamine your entire existence and your place in the world, and there’s a lot to unpack and a lot to dissect and a lot to think about.
Anybody who knows me well will tell you I’m not a very outwardly emotional person. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, so to speak. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel things, and I do get emotional about things, and the way that it comes out for me is all through the music that I write. Therefore, that’s what this is. That’s the story of this whole album. You are right in your guess about this, the first song being almost like an allegory, like a journey, of the journey that I’ve taken. I don’t know that I would say the story is a direct story of my personal experiences, but it is very symbolic of the experiences that I’ve had. That’s kinda the way that the album came about.
Interestingly how I said the first track is like a broad overview of everything, and then each subsequent track expands upon an idea that’s introduced. It is the same way lyrically, where I’m telling a big story and within that story, there are many little references to things, and then in the songs after that song for the rest of the album, they are taking those references and expanding those ideas into their full fleshed out thoughts.
On if he ever thought the lyrics were too personal – I think it’s human nature to question yourself, especially when you are putting out art into the world. Because art is, at its core, vulnerable and personal to the artist, to the creator. So yes, I would say there were those moments. But overall, you gotta just do what comes naturally and what is inspired. If I had decided, “No, this is too personal, this is too much, I need to lay off and write about something else”, I don’t even know what I would’ve written about. If I did write, it would’ve been certainly much less inspired. Going back to what I said earlier, I believe that listeners know when something is inspired and when something is something comes naturally, organically to the artist. I think you can feel that in the music. Yeah. So yeah, there were doubts, but I stand by my decision.
On if it was important to keep light and positivity while dealing with heavier subjects – I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that music should embody as many facets of life as it can. The dark, the light, the beauty, the sadness. That’s where I ended up with this album, “What am I trying to say here?” Specifically with the song “Animals”, as it is like this bookend for the album, I wanted to convey the idea that even if you spend all of the time assessing what you believe and is there a God, is there not a God, and all of these philosophical and moral questions. Even if you spend all this time and still don’t come to any firm decisions for yourself on what this life is, can we not all at least agree that it is an incredible gift we’ve been given that we get to experience this life? For whatever reason we’re here, whatever it is, be it divine, be it science, we are In this amazing world that is full of so much life and so much beauty and so much diversity, and yes, there’s sadness, and yes, there’s war and there’s anger and there’s violence, but there’s also beauty. There’s a balance in things, and that’s kinda what I was trying to get across in that song. It’s a really hard thing to convey lyrically, but I hope that the music at least conveys that idea.
On if Advent Horizon plans on touring – We would love to. The bottom line is that we’re still a pretty small band. We have fans all over the country and even internationally and we are so grateful to everybody who’s helping us spread the word right now about our music. But the sad reality is that we’re not yet big enough that we can do our own tours. I aspire to get to that point. But if we were to tour right now across the country on our own, chances are we’d be playing to 5 to 15 people in each city that we play, and that’s not sustainable financially for us.
So what we’ve resorted to at the moment is that we are going to try our best to book a few shows across the country. It won’t be a proper tour. But we just announced one in San Francisco that will be on June 13th. We have our official album release party on May 22nd in Salt Lake City. I’m trying to work on some stuff on the East Coast later on this year. That’s all I can say for now, is that we’re trying to get out there. We’re trying our best. We really would love to get on lineups of more festivals in the United States and Europe. I feel like that’s the best way for a band of our size to reach new ears and to play for the fans who love us, is to get on the festivals or potentially as an opener for a larger act, which we would also certainly love, but, these things take time and lots of building connections.
On how hard it is for a young prog band to tour when headliners don’t use openers – Yeah, you’re absolutely right. When I see bands like Dream Theater, Haken, Porcupine Tree going out and doing these tours with no opener, as a fan, I’m excited because I wanna go see Porcupine Tree and I wanna watch them play three hours of their material. That’s incredibly exciting to me. But as a band trying to break through in the world, there’s this voice in the back of my head that’s “Come on, Steven (Wilson). Why couldn’t you just throw us a bone? Give an opener a 20-minute set before you go on.”
But who am I to argue? These guys are the masters. They’ve been doing it for decades. They know what they’re doing. We just gotta work with what we’re given, and I do very much hope that at some point we can get out and open for some larger acts and see the world and meet all these wonderful people who are finding out about us.
On if he’s begun work on the next Advent Horizon record – I have to be honest with you and say I have not. All of the music for this new album came about very quickly. It was over the course of, okay, let me redact that slightly in that the music for this album yes, we began writing it during A Cell to Call Home. It was mostly that I was trying to write music for A Cell to Call Home, and every once in a while I would write a guitar riff or a keyboard part or a melody and I would go, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible,” but it didn’t quite fit the timbre of A Cell to Call Home, so I kept it in my back pocket knowing that was the foundation we would work on for this new album.
By the time we started on the new album, we had most of the parts for the song “In A Lone and Dreary World”, the 20-minute epic, written. So that song was mostly composed by the end of 2023. But everything else, the other six tracks on the record, were all written in the span of about four to five months in 2024. It came so quickly, so naturally, so organically. But also, it was almost this feeling of like I’ve I finished writing “Animals”. “Animals” was the last song that I wrote, and I finished that and I took a breath and went, “Whoa. Okay, that was a lot.” That was emotionally draining, mentally and physically taxing, all the hours that I spent behind the computer just- clicking and clicking in Pro Tools recording all the parts. It was overwhelming. It was a lot, and I had to take some time off. This would’ve been around the beginning of 2025. I said, “Okay I’m gonna step back from writing right now,” because I know that once you reach this point of exhaustion as a songwriter, if you try to push yourself past that, it’s really diminishing returns.
The last thing I wanna do is write music that is subpar just for the sake of writing music. I want it to come naturally when it comes. Yeah, short answer to that is no, we have not, but once this new album is out and I can step back from the whole release process that is currently a full-time job for me, I guarantee this summer I’m gonna be going back up to the lake with Mike and sitting with a guitar, and the inspiration will come. I’m almost 100% sure we will have music written by the end of this summer. How much music? I don’t know. Could be one song, could be 20. It’s whatever naturally comes.
On the excitement of starting with a clean slate – I think you’re right, and also what you said at the beginning. it feels like this album is us finding our sound and our formula. I agree with that, and I think it’s exciting for me as a songwriter thinking about the process from here for writing whatever comes next in that I know that formula now. I can write music and apply that formula to it, and I feel like it’s gonna come a lot more quickly now than it has in the past. So yeah, I’m excited. Very excited for whatever’s after this.
