The Album Michael Romeo Didn't Want to Break Apart

Cover of “Underworld” by Symphony X. Source: Cover Art Archive (coverartarchive.org)

Most bands fight for the single. A hook, a chorus, a slice of the album served in advance to stoke the fires of anticipation. Michael Romeo fought the opposite battle. The founder and guitarist of progressive metal institution Symphony X viewed the release of individual tracks as an act of violence against the record he had meticulously constructed. On May 22, 2015, the first single 'Nevermore' landed anyway, pulling back the curtain on a project designed to be experienced as a single, unbroken wave. The tension between the artist's intent and the machinery of the modern music industry became the defining subtext of 'Underworld', the band's ninth studio album, released on Nuclear Blast eleven years ago today. The four-year silence that preceded the album's arrival on July 24, 2015, had left the band's fanbase fractured. This wasn't a case of casual listeners drifting away; it was a schism over sonic identity. On one side stood the devotees of the 2011 predecessor 'Iconoclast', a record that pushed Symphony X's sound into a realm of crushing, relentless heaviness. On the other were the long-time listeners who craved the intricate, neo-classical melodies and labyrinthine progressive structures of the band's earlier catalog. Any new material would have to perform a high-wire act, satisfying two distinct audiences who seemed to want fundamentally different things from the same five musicians. Romeo's solution was not to choose a side but to weaponize the band's entire history. The writing process became a deliberate archaeological dig through their own discography. The group consciously re-integrated elements from previous works, treating their back catalog as a palette rather than a past to escape. This wasn't a nostalgic retreat; it was a calculated fusion designed to remind everyone—the headbangers and the prog purists—why they had fallen for Symphony X in the first place. The goal was a record that could breathe, one that refused to be just a collection of disconnected songs thrown together to fill a compact disc. The structure, as Romeo described it, was built on a dynamic of calculated collapse. He spoke of crafting deliberate valleys, jagged breaks, and towering peaks—a wave-like topography of sound that demanded a listener's full attention from start to finish. This architectural approach to songwriting is what made the single strategy feel like such a profound betrayal of the work. To extract 'Nevermore' on May 22, or the ballad 'Without You' on June 19, was to remove a load-bearing wall from an intricately designed structure. The songs worked as standalone pieces, but their true function was as movements within a larger, darker narrative suggested by the album's title. The title 'Underworld' itself functioned as a thesis statement for the music's descent into darker, mythic territory. It was a fitting banner for a collection that channeled the band's signature blend of power metal velocity, progressive metal complexity, and neo-classical shred. The official release of both singles on July 22—a mere two days before the full album dropped—felt almost like a concession, a final deep breath before the plunge. It was a compressed window that teased the melodic accessibility of the record without fully revealing the connective tissue that made the complete listening experience a distinct artistic statement. In Japan, the wait for the physical artifact extended even further. The Japanese edition didn't surface until August 24, 2015, a full month after the rest of the world had already descended into the 'Underworld'. For collectors, this delay creates a specific hierarchy of first editions, marking the original Nuclear Blast pressing from late July as the definitive moment the album entered the physical world. The staggered release is a small but crucial detail for those who track the migration of a record from a studio's hard drive to a vinyl groove or a compact disc's reflective layer. The balancing act between melody and brutality defined the album's sonic signature. Where 'Iconoclast' had often felt like a sustained, mechanized assault, 'Underworld' found its power in contrast. Tracks would pivot from neoclassical guitar runs that evoked Baroque harpsichord lines into crushing, groove-laden riffs that anchored the record firmly in the modern metal landscape. This wasn't a compromise; it was a dialogue between the band's two core identities, a conversation that had been raging since their formation and was finally allowed to play out in a single, unified work. For the collector, 'Underworld' represents a fascinating artifact of artistic resistance in the streaming era. It is a physical object—a gatefold LP or a digipak CD—that stands as a monument to the idea of the album as a coherent journey, released on a label, Nuclear Blast, synonymous with heavy music's physical culture. Holding the record is a quiet act of solidarity with Romeo's original vision: a belief that a sequence of songs, with its deliberate lulls and violent crescendos, possesses a magic that no algorithmically generated playlist can replicate. The artwork, the track listing, the weight of the disc—it all argues for patience. Eleven years on, the battle Romeo lost—the fragmentation of the album into digital singles—has become the standard operating procedure of the entire industry. Yet the record he built survives as a cohesive, breathing entity. It is a testament to a specific moment in 2015 when a veteran band refused to simply manufacture a product, choosing instead to sculpt a landscape of sound. The final irony is that the very singles he opposed served as a gateway, pulling listeners into a meticulously constructed underworld from which the only real escape was to flip the record over and start again.