PROG-ROCK AGAINST ALL WARS: Wish releases The Endless Winter

The second album by the italian progressive quartet is a moving concept album about the drama and inhumanity of wars. Still on the road seven years after their acclaimed debut-Lp, the four musicians release a courageous album, dedicated to all the victims of war

The Endless Winter: Wish band comes back!

«This album has been a long journey, and the songwriting process began in 2019, a few weeks after the release of our first album Stay Here My Friends. The album began as a tale of the past and an acknowledgement of living in a society that has betrayed primary values to us, values that so many fought for. In recent years, however, this past has been dramatically re-emerging, in a way that was unforeseeable. We are distressed, disappointed, angry, and the world scenario brings us back violently, sadly and painfully, to the stories we told on this album. In recent years, the younger generations have been suffering a rare, extraordinary level of violence, so these young people want to fight again for their ideals. A note that, in the desperation of the moment, instills great hope».

Anguish, disappointment, anger, but also hope. These aren’t common themes in progressive rock, but Wish have shown a e great strength since their debut album: they’ve shifted the focus of prog-rock to themes as intimate as they are universal, imagining their own interpretation in a mature way. Seven years after Stay Here My Friends, Wish releases a painful, human album, focused on the dark sides and conflicts of contemporary life: it’s titled The Endless Winter.

The Endless Winter title is clear: the band speaks of war. War as an endless winter, gray, bleak, stripped of all beauty. No laughter in the snow, no domestic warmth, no gifts or celebrations: a bitter cold that annihilates civilization and every dream for the future. And Wish add: «We walked the trenches and read the letters of the missing. We walked their paths, we visited the Normandy landing sites, we listened to stories, and all of this fueled our desire to recount these lives. We understand that in war, you’re just a body hiding and running for survival. Your soul is a luxury you can’t afford. We dedicate this album to the victims: to the soldiers forced to fight, to the families who lost them, and to all those who gave everything for freedom. This album tells the stories of those who witnessed the horror firsthand. Our eyes are filled with rage for the ideals we betrayed; theirs are filled with dismay, grace, and an indelible shadow. This album is for them».

Eight tracks – including Comandante Nino and The Four Rooms mini-suites – define modern progressive rock, stripped of all rhetorical frills, strengthened by the profound sense of humanity and hope the quartet expresses. From the corrosive Roger Waters to the contemporary visions of Steven Wilson, from Peter Gabriel pathos to the lyricism of Peter Hammill, Wish once again begin with a thematic core that they develop through a conceptual album: a sonic narrative that drives the listener on a journey through war, tragedy, inhumanity and the distant but visible lights of hope.

If prog-rock of their first album conveyed the message of friendship, The Endless Winter is an opportunity to demonstrate that the genre – especially the more eclectic one of Wish, who also listen to singer-songwriter music, contemporary art rock, and the new sounds – lives when fueled by compelling themes that unite us all. «Through profound, human stories, we recount our times, the emotions and feelings that guide us. For us, prog isn’t just a musical style, obviously our favorite, but the artistic medium that best expresses our idea of storytelling: we like to create a narrative journey that’s musical but more than that. We strongly believe in a form of writing that speaks to profound values, not rhetorically, but through the narration of human events».

Wish was born in 1992, and the idea of a concept album has been with them since the beginning. In 1997 the quartet moved increasingly toward progressive music: after building their own recording studio BbBox with a steady lineup, they released Stay Here My Friends in 2019. The debut album was acclaimed by audiences and media worldwide, paving the way for their second LP, The Endless Winter.