Many artists would follow a mainstream moment with the most accessible music of their career. However, weeks after finishing in the Top 10 at the Eurovision Song Contest, Voyager have doubled down on their heavy synth-prog with new album Fearless In Love. Singer Danny Estrin, guitarist Simone Dow and bassist Alex Canion tell Prog about life after playing to more than 160 million people.
It’s early June when Prog video-calls Voyager frontman Danny Estrin, guitarist Simone Dow and bassist/singer Alex Canion, and the trio are midway through being smashed back into reality. This time last month, the Perth-based band (rounded out by drummer Ashley Doodkorte and Dow’s co-guitarist Scott Kay) were jet-setting in luxury. They were traipsing across Europe and getting interviewed by countless glossy magazines, all part of the run-up to them representing Australia to more than 160 million TV viewers live at the Eurovision Song Contest. Now they’re back home – and getting hammered by a storm so violent that it routinely wipes out their internet connection and freaks out Canion’s dog, Seamus.
“We played the WA Day festival [in Perth] yesterday,” Dow tells us, camera off to put less stress on the struggling WiFi, “and our booking agent sent us a video of the backstage area after we left. You should have seen the flooding! It was insane!”
Although Mother Nature is trying to quite literally rain on their parade, there’s no denying that Voyager became progressive music’s newest superstars this spring. Eurovision is touted worldwide as an international celebration of top-shelf songwriting (despite it frequently showcasing the most OTT pop possible) – and the synthprog quintet had been chasing that rainbow from the moment Australia joined, in 2015. They came tantalisingly close with their pop-prog anthem Dreamer in 2022, finishing second in Eurovision: Australia Decides, the nationally televised competition to select the country’s representative. This year, they finally got sent to the semi-finals when they were held in Liverpool, thanks to the electrorock singalong of Promise.
Voyager advanced to the grand final and – after an 80s-throwback performance, replete with sequinned jackets, keytar solos and larking about on a Toyota MR2 sports car – finished a massively respectable ninth out of the 20 finalists. The band couldn’t overcome the litany of public votes for Finnish rapper Käärijä, nor the jury’s collective passion for Sweden’s now-two-time winner Loreen. However, for five people playing prog in the isolation of Western Australia, it marked an underdog triumph.
“It’s pretty incredible!” Estrin exclaims. “We were just a p
