UK prog metal trio tackle polarising mindsets on their far-reaching conceptual trilogy.
FINAL COIL WAS originally a solo project born from the mind of multi-instrumentalist Phil Stiles back in 2002, but it didn’t remain a one-man band for long. After meeting guitarist Richard Awdry through a mutual friend, the duo wrote and recorded some demos before Stiles headed off to Poland for four years to teach English.
The pair remained in touch however, so upon Stiles’s return to Leicester in 2008 they decided to get together to see whether they could scratch a collective musical itch together again. Stiles’s wife, Jola, whom he fondly describes as a“very, very talented musician”, completed the trio on bass duties.
Working on songs in 2008 that had existed since 2003 confirmed that the material the band had slowly written and even recorded during some of Awdry’s visits to Poland over the years was worth pouring more time, money and love into. But they never had “any vision” of it going further than “just playing music together”.
Despite doing a few recordings that they “don’t really talk about”, it wasn’t until the release of 2015’s Closed To The Light EP that Final Coil began to garner attention. With the EP eventually attracting the attention of a small recording studio in Italy, the band were propositioned.
“They wrote to us and said, ‘Look, if you come to Italy and record with us, we will pitch you to a label’,” Stiles tells Prog.“We live in an era of internet scams, so we looked at it a little aghast at first. But we thought,‘To hell with it –the worst case scenario is we get a month in Italy as a holiday and we get to play music,’” he recalls.
True to their word, the studio recommended Final Co
