Prog monsters The Dear Hunter notch another solid entry into their lore-heavy discography, despite some moments of overindulgence.
Release date: March 20, 2026 | Independent | Instagram | Bandcamp
I will get it out of the way immediately and let you know that I have zero knowledge of The Dear Hunter‘s concept album lore. Almost all of their albums from their debut in 2006 up to 2016’s Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional are Coheed & Cambria-level dense, and while that’s all fun and dandy, I just never took the time to do my homework on them. The Dear Hunter then moved on and released some regular-type albums, at least for a few years, until starting a new sci-fi saga with 2022’s Antimai, the prequel to their most recent release Sunya.
Got all that? Me neither. I don’t dislike concept albums on principle, and find many of them to be interesting experiments in narrative design, but my point with all this preamble is that you don’t really have to be ‘caught up’ in order to enjoy Sunya. You do, however, really have to like massive, theatrical, progressive rock, because you’re about to get steamrolled by it.
Sunya opens with the over-seven-minutes-long “The Wasteland”, which features a jazz fusion synth run right off the bat that caught me completely off guard. I was not expecting what is colloquially referred to as ‘Mario Kart music’ in a prog album, but hey, I ain’t complaining. “The Wasteland” is a nice snapshot of Sunya as a whole in that it is extremely sprawling in its instrumentation. Gorgeous vocal layering, badass prog guitar runs, plenty of violins, weirdo synth stuff. There’s what sounds like a jaw harp in the mix. Crazy business.
After that fairly massive opening, Sunya takes a bit of a left turn with the surprisingly pop punk-adjacent “Marauders”, which showcases the band at their most late-career Coheed. I was pleased to hear something so downright melodic after the (still enjoyable, to be clear) density of “The Wasteland”. “The Bazaareteria” keeps things tight as well, clocking in at five minutes exactly and retaining the catchiness of the previous song. For a hot second, I thought The Dear Hunter was pivoting towards a relatively ‘normal’ prog rock record.
And then we approach “The Glass Desert” series.
The following three tracks on Sunya are The Dear Hunter in excellent, and well-practiced, form, a multi-part epic that shows off their penchant for worldbuilding. “I – Giants” was the lead single off the album for good reasons. The talkbox lines are extremely catchy and bring a nice funky flavor to a pretty out-there composition, and the title drop–‘High enough to topple giants’–is a very memorable vocal run. This track honestly feels like it could have been on Snarky Puppy‘s Somni for the sheer amount of orchestration, complete with saxophones and trumpets.
The other two tracks in “The Glass Desert” are also standouts, to the point that I think this trio could have sufficed for a nice EP. “II – Cliffs and Stormlands” goes full disco for a few minutes before heading back to the jazz fusion sound of “The Wasteland”, which is a nice change of pace within the weeds of a fairly complex album. “III – The Plains” slows things down a bit with the only really low-tempo track on Sunya, and while I don’t think it hits quite as hard as its brothers, it’s still very pleasant to experience.
Does The Dear Hunter occasionally get a little indulgent with Sunya? Yeah. It’s not damning, necessarily, but there was more than once during my listening cycles where I thought they were having a bit of a Clockwork Angels moment, and while I am an unrepentant Rush nerd, that’s not a particularly flattering comparison. Prog is always at risk of this over-the-top shit due to the experimental nature of the genre, and The Dear Hunter are certainly interested in pushing the envelope. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it is simply too much sound. One of the joys of this kind of music, for me, is to pick apart each layer and catch the little bits and pieces. I like digging around for strange or unexpected instrumentation and harmony, and unfortunately some of Sunya is just too dense and bordering on overproduced to do so.
That’s maybe a track or two, though, on a 41-minute album where each track contains so many twists and turns it almost feels like it’s fourteen songs instead of seven. I spent the majority of my time with Sunya in a state of mild but pleasant confusion, sorting through and processing what exactly I was hearing. There was also a lot of grooving around at my desk when The Dear Hunter really hit their stride, which reminded me of some of the tracks on Antimai I enjoyed, like the egregiously funky “Ring 7”. Anyway–this is simply an enormous album that will awaken some sort of nerd in you, be it music theory or sci-fi fantasy or, dare I say, former-Tally Hall-fan theater kid. Prepare accordingly.
