Soen

Announced in 2010, written for years before that

Soen's public life began in May 2010, when the band was announced with a line-up that read like a progressive metal crossword: Martin Lopez, who had drummed for Amon Amarth and then Opeth; Steve Di Giorgio, the fretless bassist known from Death, Testament and Sadus; Joakim Platbarzdis on guitar; and Joel Ekelöf, then of the largely unknown Willowtree, singing. The material went back further than the announcement — the band dates its own beginnings to 2004 — and the first thing anyone outside it heard was a track called “Fraccions”, posted on the band's website in October 2010. It is still in the set sixteen years on.

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Six records to arrive at a formula

Cognitive appeared in February 2012, mixed by David Bottrill, and set the early template: long, smoky, deliberately unhurried songs that critics almost immediately measured against Tool. Tellurian followed in November 2014, Lykaia in February 2017 — recorded entirely on analogue equipment — and Lotus in February 2019. Lotus is the record reviewers now point to as the turn: the songs got shorter, the choruses got bigger, and the band stopped treating length as a virtue.

Imperial arrived in January 2021, the first Soen album for Silver Lining Music, the label they have stayed with since. Memorial came on 1 September 2023, produced by David Castillo, with the Italian singer Elisa guesting on “Hollowed”. It was their best-charting record to that point, reaching number eight in Switzerland, fourteen in Germany and sixty-nine in the Netherlands — evidence that the streamlining had found an audience even as it cost them some of the original one.

The line-up moved underneath all of this. Di Giorgio left in 2013 and Platbarzdis in 2015. Lars Åhlund joined on keyboards in 2014 and Cody Lee Ford took over guitar in 2018; Oleksii Kobel played bass on Memorial, and Stefan Stenberg returned to the bass seat in 2025. The constant is the Ekelöf–Lopez axis, which Lopez has described as holding together through friendship and mutual respect rather than any formal arrangement.

Reliance, and the split verdict

Reliance was released on 16 January 2026 through Silver Lining Music, produced by Alexander Backlund and tracked at Fascination Street Studios: ten songs, forty-three and a half minutes. The campaign was unusually long-fused, with “Primal” out on 20 September 2025, “Mercenary” on 5 November, “Discordia” on 14 December and the ballad “Indifferent” on 13 January 2026, three days before the album. A video for “Axis” followed in April. It reached number nineteen in Germany and twenty-eight in Switzerland.

Lopez framed the record, in an interview published on the eve of release, as being about dependence — specifically the courage to depend on other people, set against what he sees as a self-centred default in the culture around him. He singled out “Discordia” as the most exposed thing on it, more introverted and more vulnerable than Soen usually allow themselves, and said putting it out took some nerve.

The reception split along a clean line. One British reviewer called it precise and succinct, praised the compression of riffs, choruses and atmosphere into three-to-five-minute songs, and rated Ekelöf's singing as the album's engine; another, also writing in January 2026, found the record wrings every last drop of sentiment from its subject matter and called “Indifferent” heart-wrenching. On the other side, a progressive-metal specialist site scored it five out of ten, arguing that nearly every track runs verse–chorus–soft bridge–climax, that the lyrics have become on-the-nose, and that the band has traded the mysterious melodies of Cognitive and Tellurian for radio-shaped hooks. The word that particular review reached for — dad rock — has followed the album around.

Where they stand in autumn 2026

Commercially the argument has not slowed them down. Tickets for the North American leg went on sale on 23 January 2026, a week after the album, for a co-headline run with the Gothenburg melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity billed as the Scandinavian Heavy Arts Tour, with Andorra's Persefone opening. It began on 27 March 2026 in Joliet, Illinois and ran through April across twenty-five cities, taking in Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, New York and Boston. Lopez has since said the pairing worked precisely because Soen bring something unlike melodic death metal to a melodic death metal crowd.

The summer was festivals and clubs: Andernach on 2 May, MammothFest in Thessaloniki on 13 June, RockHarz at Ballenstedt on 4 July, then a Polish run through late August. Autumn takes the band to Australia in October — Melbourne's 170 Russell on the 16th, Manning Bar in Sydney on the 17th, Crowbar in Brisbane on the 19th — before the headline European and UK leg announced in April alongside the “Axis” video, with Tribulation and Vulkan supporting.

That European run opens at Zeche Bochum on 16 November and TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 17 November, crosses to Britain for Rebellion in Manchester on the 19th, Digital in Newcastle on the 20th and Islington Assembly Hall in London on the 21st, then works through Paris, Pratteln, Murcia, Seville, Lisbon, Madrid, Bilbao, Grenoble, Mannheim, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Prague, Leipzig and Hamburg, finishing on 13 December. Further out, the band are booked for Bangers Open Air in São Paulo in April 2027 and Montevideo on 5 May 2027 — which will take Lopez back to the country he was born in.

On stage in 2026

The Reliance shows are tight rather than sprawling, which is consistent with the record. At Fabryka Kultury Zgrzyt in Lublin on 23 August the band went on at 20:40 and were off by 22:00: eleven songs plus a two-song encore in eighty minutes. Across the thirty-two setlists from the tour that setlist.fm counts as complete, the average show is twelve songs, opening with “Mercenary”, “Antagonist” and “Fraccions” and closing on “Unbreakable”.

The shape is deliberate. New material — “Mercenary”, “Discordia”, “Primal”, sometimes “Indifferent” — is spaced between older anchors, so “Memorial”, “Lascivious”, “Martyrs”, “Lotus”, “Violence” and “Illusion” carry the middle. Nothing from the current album is played as a block, and the encore leans on songs the audience already knows.

Visually the band lean on projection rather than production. A reviewer covering the Texas date of the Scandinavian Heavy Arts Tour in April 2026 described a set carried by graphics and animation, with “Primal” introduced by Charlie Chaplin's “let us all unite” speech from The Great Dictator, turning the song into an explicitly anti-fascist moment. Lopez, for his part, has said plainly that he thinks live performance is where Soen are strongest — that the emotional weight of the material lands differently in a room than it does on a stream.