Drawn together by a shared love of heavy metal and progressive rock, Riverside emerged in the early 2000s in Warsaw, Poland. Founded by mutual friends who intended to use their backgrounds in metal to explore new territory in prog rock along the lines of Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, and Tool, the quartet began creating spacious and experimental music with a metal edge on their 2003 debut, Out of Myself. They hit their stride in the late 2000s, topping the Polish charts in 2009 with their fourth full-length outing, Anno Domini High Definition. The untimely death of guitarist Piotr Grudziński in 2016 put the band's future in jeopardy, but they reconvened in 2018 as a trio for the studio LP Wasteland…
A former member of Frank Zappa’s touring band and longstanding member of guitar hero Allan Holdsworth’s trio, power-precision drummer Chad Wackerman is also an accomplished composer with five albums as a leader to his credit. His latest features Holdsworth (his third time playing sideman to Wackerman), along with the guitarist’s longtime bassist, Jimmy Johnson. The three exhibit their usual uncanny chemistry on a number of Wackerman’s harmonically advanced, prog-rock-meets-jazz originals.