''Polaris'' is the third studio album by British
progressive metal
Progressive metal (sometimes shortened to prog metal) is a broad fusion music genre melding heavy metal and progressive rock, combining the loud "aggression" and amplified guitar-driven sound of the former with the more experimental, cerebral ...
band
Tesseract
In geometry, a tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of ei ...
. It was released on 18 September 2015, both digitally and physically on vinyl and CD. There is also a 2-disc version with the album mixed in 5.1 surround sound.
Background
Tesseract parted ways with vocalist Ashe O'Hara in June 2014 and invited original vocalist Daniel Tompkins back into the band. Tompkins, who had been dedicated full-time to the band
Skyharbor
Skyharbor is an Indian/American progressive metal band with members from New Delhi and Mumbai, India; and Cleveland, Ohio, US.
History
The band was initially guitarist Keshav Dhar's studio project, before TesseracT vocalist Daniel Tompk ...
, agreed to return, and writing for a third Tesseract album commenced.
The first single from the album, "Messenger", was released on 3 August 2015 on
Kscope
Kscope is an independent record label that is part of Snapper Music, and a sister-label of Peaceville. It is dedicated to artists in the progressive rock genre. The label has released albums by Steven Wilson and his projects Porcupine Tree (m ...
's
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...
and
SoundCloud
SoundCloud is an online audio distribution platform and music sharing website that enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio. Founded in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud is one of the largest music streaming s ...
pages. The second single from the album, "Survival" was then released on 3 September 2015 along with the video for the same. The video was filmed and directed by Pele Newell with the Derbyshire landscape as the backdrop.
Critical reception
''Polaris'' received generally positive reviews. Review aggregate
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews