Alex Henry Foster Releases 'A Nightfall Ritual' Featuring The Unreleased Song 'Up Til Dawn'
Just ahead of his first concert of the year at the Midsummer Prog Festival in Maastricht, Netherlands, Alex Henry Foster unveils his highly anticipated live album A Nightfall Ritual, available today, May 16, via Hopeful Tragedy Records, featuring the previously unreleased track Up Til Dawn.
Just like everything Foster does, the new single explores new musical landscape and shifts between hypnotic bass line and explosive post-metal, infused with a touch of gothic rock. Dark and heavy with crushing riffs in its first half, the track takes a strikingly different and more energetic turn midway through - a spiritually charged journey that pulls the listener into a trance-like state.
"If grace can save us all, it's always death that seems to come back first.
Time, oh Time - stranger to us all.
As we're crumbling with the moon
It's always the distance that hurts the most."
The album already has already garnered early support from CREEM Magazine, Prog Magazine, Visions Magazin, WherePostRockDwells, and the Corus Radio network across Canada with his his second single, The Son of Hannah which Alan Cross named Undiscovered Gem of the Week. It displays Foster and his Shadows' rich, multi-layered wall of sounds with all the passion and mastery they’re now well-known for, defined by a vivid dramatic honesty that comes with the singer’s comeback into the lights after surviving an emergency heart surgery necessitating a double graft two years ago.
The film documents the final show of Foster’s comeback tour and features two radically reimagined versions of songs from his Billboard #4-charting live album Standing Under Bright Lights: The Son of Hannah, which originally premiered at the International Montreal Jazz Festival, and The Pain That Bonds - a 17-minute epic that closes the new album. Interestingly, the song was originally a five-minute opening track on Foster’s Billboard #6-charting debut album Windows in the Sky.
Foster reflects on this new chapter: "The new songs “Up Til Dawn” and “I’m Afraid” are the initial reflection of that resurgent stage, while “The Son of Hannah” represents the first glimpse of conscious awareness I had after the release of my album “Windows in the Sky”, a liberating record whose emancipative voyage began with the bleak reflection that was the song “The Pain That Bonds” before undergoing its emerging hopeful transfiguration."
The concept of time is also central to the narrative arc of the record: "Some might say that I have assembled the project going backwards, but it couldn’t be more foreign a thought to my vision, as my perspective is neither linear nor subject to any kind of backward revisitation. It is in fact perpetually circular, and even though this may give the impression that I need to return to the starting point again and again to keep on going, my approach is that we redefine each of those markers as we pass through them, creating an ever-increasing distance in time and space every time, like an upward spiral, exponentially evolving, so you never know where the actual starting point is."
Foster will also take part in several major progressive rock festivals across Europe in 2025, beginning with Midsummer Prog in Maastricht, Netherlands. He was also announced for the 10th edition of the prestigious Cruise to the Edge in 2026.
