Starset

Starset makes rock built to sound enormous, layering distorted guitars over synthesizers and orchestral parts until a single chorus arrives with the weight of a film score. Dustin Bates writes and shapes all of it, and his vocals ride over the top of the noise rather than fighting through it.

The band calls the result cinematic rock, and the phrase describes method as much as tone: songs are written to connect, with passages bridging one into the next, and the catalogue hangs on an invented science-fiction story about intercepted transmissions and a research society that runs underneath the music. The sound moves between heavy, industrial-edged sections and long ambient stretches, and the two are treated as equally important.

It is an unusually deliberate way to run a rock band. Starset would rather build a world and write songs inside it than assemble a set of singles, and the records reward being heard in order.