Protest The Hero Are Headed Down Under

Canadian prog-metal trailblazers Protest The Hero have announced that they are set to return to Australia for six shows this September.

Still riding high on the tail of the band's fourth album, last year's Volition – an album that met its gestational crowdfunding goal in a single day – is cited as some of the band's heaviest, most challenging work to date. “The music is still bat-shit crazy a lot of the time, but there's more structure,” lead guitarist Luke Hoskin said in a statement.

In fact, album track A Life Embossed is pegged as the heaviest song Protest The Hero has ever written – not exactly a small feat – both in instrumentation and, to a lesser extent, thematically, as the song explicitly condemns breed-specific legislation against pitbulls. The album is permeated by socially conscious themes, from Plato's Tripartite, which especially relevantly highlights the pervasive issue of misogyny to Tilting Against Windmills, a call to arms against homophobia in religious fundamentalism.

Protest The Hero will touch down at Brisbane's HiFi on Thursday, September 4 before hitting Sydney's Manning Bar on September 5 and The HiFi Melbourne on September 6. The band follows those shows up with a pair of licensed all-ages events in Hobart (The Brisbane Hotel, September 7) and Adelaide (Fowlers Live, September 9), pulling up stumps the next day at Perth's Amplifier Bar.

Tickets for the shows will set you back $45 + bf; tickets, including VIP meet-and-greet packages, are available now.