The 25th Hour are an instrumental prog metal trio from San Diego, California.
Their newest album titled “Monsters” can be described as if The Fall Of Troy had a love child with After The Burial. Maybe a splash of Behold… The Arctopus in there too. Heavy, intense, groovy, and ambient. An overall excellent instrumental album!

The album’s brief opening track “Chosen One” starts off with a lovely bass lead into heavy mayhem and melody, then blends perfectly into the second track. Overall the entire album seems to have a constant flow, everything bleeding into one another to create almost one big 36minute song. To think these three guys are not even signed to a label. Hello, Relapse? Yeah do it. They are definitely worthy of that label and the sound they kind of lean towards.

This album is very well rounded ranging from heavy breakdown found in such tracks as “Abubbahkah” and more relaxed clean ambient music such as “Apparition”. The albums closing track,  ”Attack of the Zombabies ” has all this and more. Clicking in as the longest track at 9:30mins they utilize every second to make diverse progressive metal at it’s finest.
The album ranges from everything from tech/death, post punk, a tad of sumeriancore and a whole lot of prog.

Well, there are moments on the album where I think to myself “Lyrics here would totally fit” which is kind of not a good thought to have about an instrumental album. Not that it deters away from the excellent musicianship of the trio, but it just has moments of those gaps, for lack of a better word. But overall this is a worthy album to purchase for any fan of good progressive experimental music in general.

As well, the album art is cool as hell. A pissed off octopus and a group of gnarly werewolves divided by a green skinned , intestine eating zombie baby. METAL

Overall: 8/10