PrYzme is a French outfit formed in 2014, and release their sophomore effort, True Stories….And Other Lies, a nice play on words which suggests that our personal stories can be lies in the eyes of others, and that is an interesting truism, because it is a fundamental human trait that we interpret and tell stories that generally accord with our view of self or the wider world.
The music & lyrics are by David Chollet and Dominique Blanchard who both play guitars and provide the vocals. Completing the lineup are Lucas Planque on drums, and Benoît Toquet on bass & vocals.
We have seven pieces of music, including two of epic length, on an album just shy of an hour. Let’s discuss them.
We open with a short instrumental, Echo of Silent Place, a sort of busy electronica piece with some disturbing effects before a guitar burst closes.
Earth Song is very interesting lyrically, dealing with the fundamental hubris of modern societal thinking that science had conquered all, including nature, and it is now quite clearly biting us on our collective backsides. I played this track on my radio show of 17th May 2025 (you can catch this by going to the podcast page at https://progzilla.com/lazland-on-progzilla-radio-episode-32/ ) We have a thunderstorm to put across to us the urgency of our plight in addition to human voices across the ether with more disturbing effects. When the main piece kicks in after a minute, it does so with a breeziness which belies the subject matter, a very nice collective producing symphonic pleasantry, the voices perfectly conveying their message in a tuneful delivery. The guitar work is very good, as the track proceeds there is an increasingly urgent and darker hue to the song, reflecting the dire situation we find ourselves in. This is a solid start to proceedings.
Some world leaders would do well to put End of the Anger on a few times and take heed of the sage wisdom that after the storm of the fallout, there must come a reckoning of love, understanding, finding common ground. Goodness knows we could do with some of that. There are some more interesting programming effects on this at the start, and they are impactful. The opening riffs are dramatic and as we progress, there are some decent complexities in the music, the rhythm section providing a very decent heavy jazz-infused base, the organ complementing this, a gorgeous guitar and then voices harmonising. This band are proving here their versatility. It is not prog by numbers, but some very good changes in styles and moods. No, it is not groundbreaking, as they admit themselves, but there is a pleasing originality to their sound and the closing passage is thunderous. It is embedded below.
Green Eyes is the first epic track, the title of the song referring to a mysterious person with said coloured eyes visiting the protagonist in what seems a particularly intense dream that was a wrench to leave upon waking up. The pastoral opening is in sharp contrast to what preceded it, and the vocals here are really very pretty indeed, one of the acoustic delights of 2025 thus far, the music perfectly reflecting the gentle voice from far away, even when the electric guitars and whole band enter the fray, a delightful classic rock inspired song, with orchestration adding layered soundscapes combined with an extended instrumental passage in which the bass takes the lead alongside swirling keys before a lush guitar solo cements the deal. A contender for epic track of the year on this website’s annual award, it is a delight from start to surround sound finish.
This moves nicely into Reality of Dreams, a guitarist seeking fame, being discovered by Steven Wilson, touching his dream, playing with superstars. I would be fascinated to learn whether this piece has been written with somebody specific in mind. As one might expect, the guitars take centre stage here, some lush fretwork delighting our ears, a heavily jazz rock style at play, reminding me in places of some of Level 42’s work back in the day.
Never Again is the penultimate piece and is a very personal narrative about how God seemingly is content to see a young, innocent, child carry a death sentence, I assume a deadly disease such as cancer and immediately takes on a dark, dystopian front, the echoing bass very much in your face and taking on, for me, a sort of anti-hymn pastiche, the sound filling the room, including bells, but not in the worshipful manner of your local cathedral, but the dark underground where pushbacks against the accepted norms of religion and society have always taken place. The jazz improvisation and voices are the opposite of what came before. They are irregular, biting, and the guitar solo is full of (superb) dark emotion. It is embedded below for you.
We close with the longest song, Silent Place. It strikes me as being a narrative about being lonely, lost, in a world of people in an unwelcoming place and longing to be back home with the family we know we can trust. It opens with more of those industrial effects, this exemplified by late Crimsonesque riffs, the lead vocal descriptive and narrative. Toquet is again at the forefront of all that is good here musically, the bassist definitely one of my highlight finds of the year, leading the grooves with aplomb, the pace picking up impressively as the ride somewhere begins, a sense of excitement palpable, and as this progresses you are treated to a passage where you are listening to a four-piece band utterly comfortable with their collaboration, tight, able to produce sudden changes in tempo and mood at the switch of a note, encompassing the diametric range of the progressive rock spectrum.
True Stories…and Other Lies is a very impressive album from a band I had not heard before but want to hear a lot more of. Very well produced and another example of the vibrant progressive scene that France is producing presently. It comes very highly recommended. For details of how to purchase, you can go along to https://pryzme.bandcamp.com/album/true-stories-and-other-lies