With 10 days to go until Dream Theater kick off their 40th anniversary tour in London, the band has set the release date for Parasomnia. The album, which is available for preorder and due out Feb. 7, will be the group’s first to feature drummer Mike Portnoy, a founding member, since 2009’s Black Clouds and Silver Linings. The title “parasomnia” is a catchall phrase for nighttime disturbances from sleepwalking to night terrors.
Fittingly, the first taste of the album is “Night Terror,” a typically acrobatic 10-minute prog-metal odyssey into a fantastical macabre nightscape. The band filmed a video for the song in what looks like a haunted mansion. Frontman James LaBrie climbs dusty stairs as he sings the chorus — “Night terror, hysteria/Nocturnal trial by fire/Eyes open wide but I can’t see” — until his bandmates direct him back into a labyrinthine guitar riff.
The song isn’t even Parasomnia’s longest — “Dead Asleep” stretches past 11 minutes while the closing track, “The Shadow Man,” tops out at nearly 20 minutes. The group’s guitarist John Petrucci produced the 71-minute record, and Hugh Syme created the cover art.
“Everything we’ve been writing sounds like every classic Dream Theater song or album,” Portnoy told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “The style is here. The chemistry is the same. The people and the elements are the same. It all just feels and sounds so familiar.”
The album will come out in a variety of formats, including a limited-edition deluxe box set, which contains the album on one CD, instrumentals of every track on another, and a Blu-ray featuring the album in 5.1 surround sound, a 68-page booklet, the album on vinyl, and Dream Theater-related goodies. The double-CD, Blu-ray combo will also be available as a standalone release, as will the vinyl edition. And casual fans of 71-minute albums could still buy the CD as a standalone single disc or listen to it digitally.
Dream Theater will kick off their anniversary tour — dubbed an Evening With Dream Theater — on Oct. 20 with a gig at London’s O2. A Mexico City date is scheduled for December but the North American leg of the tour begins Feb. 7 in Philadelphia and will run through a March 22 date at their hometown venue, New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
“We expect the first show to be an emotional experience — not only for the five of us but for everybody in the audience,” Portnoy told Rolling Stone earlier this year. “I have a feeling there will be people coming in from all over the world to be present for the first show together. It’s scary because, under normal circumstances, it takes a bunch of shows to get your sea legs back. But in this case, we need to hit the ground running. That first show is going to be dissected with a magnifying glass in the age of YouTube. We can’t suck.”
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Parasomnia track list:
1. “In the Arms of Morpheus”
2. “Night Terror”
3. “A Broken Man”
4. “Dead Asleep”
5. “Midnight Messiah”
6. “Are We Dreaming?”
7. “Bend the Clock”
8. “The Shadow Man Incident”