Track By Tracks: In Virtue - Age Of Legends (2025)

About the album as a whole (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

On this album, the lyrics are extremely personal. It’s a story about a character, but he’s just the proxy for my own experiences and ideas. It’s a concept album about someone who has made poor choices in the past and is on a journey of self-forgiveness. The character in the story is based on Sisyphus, who was a terrible, tyrannical king who was deserving of punishment - but is there truly anything someone can do to deserve eternal punishment?

In it, this Sisyphus character decides (with a little help from a character called The Catalyst) that after thousands of years of torment, he’s done his time and that he’s going to seek forgiveness from the most important person we all need it from - ourselves.

I wrote it as a way of working through my own self-imposed punishment for my own failures and shortcomings, a catharsis to carve a way forward for myself. Realistically, none of us will ever do anything nearly as horrible as Sisyphus or any equivalent monster. But we still often hold the regret and guilt over our heads for so long.

As I wrote in the song “Purgatory”,

“Paper handcuffs and shadow walls

Shackled here by guilt alone”

So it’s about releasing ourselves from this state and moving on with our lives, because until you do, you can’t do any good in the world, for yourself or anyone else.

Musically, it’s built on a classic foundation of heavy riffs and groovy drums, but with layers of cinematic elements like synths and orchestration to transport the listener and elevate the songs at key moments. It’s not symphonic metal in the traditional sense like Nightwish or something - the orchestration isn’t there as an end unto itself, or to just make it epic. Vocally, it covers a lot of range, from gritty, powerful cleans to more guttural growls and screams, and a lot in between. There are a fair bit of guitar and keyboard solos, but none overstay their welcome.

Track by Track (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

1. Ascent Glorious:

This is the album intro - it’s purely orchestration, and it introduces the primary melodic theme, as well as what I call “The Sound” - a sort of bell-like tone that represents The Catalyst’s awakening of Sisyphus from his torment.

It’s a bit Disney, but I love the melody so much. It comes back several times throughout the album, in different forms and variations.

2. Sisyphus Awakening:

This song is one of the first I wrote for the album. It has an extremely strong opening, and it segues nicely from the intro track, I think. Since it’s one of the older ones, it still has a bit of leftover prog ambition, which I think is apt for it to be so early on in the track listing, then as we move into the future, we move away from it.

It represents exactly what the title says - it’s Sisyphus awakening from the endless grind of his torment, and breaking his shackles to escape from his eternal punishment.

3. Karma Loop:

This was actually the last song to be written for the album, I think. It features my friend Charlotte Wessels on vocals, and she brought so much energy and beautiful harmony to the song that it wound up becoming my favorite.

It was actually based around a guitar part (the opening lick of the song) that I wrote a long time ago for a guitar demo for my YouTube channel, and our former drummer, Mazen (Ayoub, who plays on the album, sat down and turned it into a song one day.

Lyrically, it’s a conversation between Sisyphus and The Catalyst, in which she is convincing him that his punishment is self-inflicted, and he is worth doing the work to redeem himself.

Fun fact: The lyrics make reference to an old song by the Kingston Trio called “M.T.A.”, in which a man can’t get off the train because he doesn’t have money to pay his fare, of which he is a nickel short (“one more nickel”). It also references the “buy the ticket, take the ride” quote from Hunter S. Thompson.

4. Push That Rock:

In which Sisyphus goes from the lowest possible point in his life to a place of high hope. It consists almost entirely of one line of lyrics: Push that rock back up that hill. It’s a mantra that we’ll revisit later in the album, and between now and then, the meaning will transform - but at this point, it’s his entire existence, it’s all he knows. It’s the torment he brought on himself, and he hates it.

Fun fact: I recorded some of the vocals for this in the Tom Waits room of Prairie Sun studio, on the mic that he sings into on his albums. I thought it fit the vibe pretty perfectly, and we recorded drum tracks there for Purgatory and Where The Edges Meet, so it worked out.

5. Purgatory:

This was the first song we recorded and released with the new lineup, when the plan was for Age of Legends to be a 3-song EP. We road-tripped up to Prairie Sun studios in Cotati, California, to track the drums because initially, I was going to record a different drummer for these songs before we found Mazen, and it was too late to get my deposit back.

In this song, he describes the depth of his torment and what he longs to escape from.

6. Exposed:

This is one of two songs we worked on with my friend and producer Sahaj.

Lyrically, it describes Sisyphus’ relationship with The Catalyst, and the gift she’s given him by not only setting him free, but by giving him a reason to want to even bother to try.

7. Scream:

This is the second of the two songs we worked on with Sahaj, who provided some much-needed perspective on the songs, much like The Catalyst does for Sisyphus.

In this song, we get a closer look at the message from The Catalyst to Sisyphus in his state of eternal punishment. She can’t free him - only he can do that. No one else is coming to save him. In order to break free, he first has to believe he’s worthy, and then he has to care enough to try. He can’t just be complacent - he needs to be angry enough to SCREAM.

8. Where The Edges Meet:

This was the second single we released, and the second song we recorded with the new lineup.

Sisyphus is at last free and returns to the real world to find a divided people. He reflects on his personal struggles that led him to act the way he did in his past life, and considers how to move forward in this new world.

This song introduces the album title - Age of Legends - which references a concept I borrowed from The Wheel of Time series. In the Age of Legends, mankind enjoyed peace, prosperity, and technology that became lost due to humanity’s inability to be content and coexist.

Sisyphus again becomes a leader in the modern world by championing this concept, inspiring people to be good to each other and lift each other up. But it won’t last…

9. Gunslingers of the New American Desert:

…because power calls to him. In Gunslingers, Sisyphus can’t resist the call, and the song details his breaking bad arc. He sees the opportunity to seize the kind of power he once held, and takes it by force, falling back into his old ways.

I had actually once conceptualized a whole album of sort of post-apocalyptic sci-fi steampunky space Western songs with the same title, and this was the only thing that actually came from it.

This is by far the slowest song in the entire In Virtue catalog, and in my estimation, the heaviest thing I’ve ever written. The lyrics are also very emotionally heavy, describing the tradeoff of humanity for the empty promise of power, and the human toll such a deal takes.

10. Desolation Throne:

In which Sisyphus ascends to his throne of evil, convincing himself that he’s earned it by his suffering.

I was trying to channel Russel Allen in my vocal performance, to make it sound mean and evoke a gangster-like quality similar to the Symphony X Underworld album. I also put in a little 2005 metalcore chugging to hearken back to my days watching bands like Unearth and Killswitch Engage at small venues throughout Massachusetts.

The bridge of this song is my favorite single moment on the whole album. It simultaneously shows his emotional insecurity and how small he feels, and how he reacts to that by lashing out at the world that doesn’t understand him and trying to dominate it.

It also features one of my favorite guitar solos.

11. Thoughts in Freefall:

In Desolation Throne, he is ascending to power, climbing upwards ever higher without considering how high above the ground he is. He comes to the highest peak possible - there’s no higher he could go.

Consumed with his lust for power and insane, in Thoughts in Freefall, he posits that “If I fall forever, I will never hit the ground”. He thinks himself invincible and needs little provocation to demonstrate that fact. “I am immune to gravity”.

Naturally, he is about to make contact with the consequences of his actions.

Features an absolute dickripper of a guitar solo by Dave Davidson of Revocation.

12. The River:

The “find out’ in Thoughts in Freefall’s “fuck around”.

Where previously he said, “If I fall forever”, we begin with “I fell forever”.

He loses everything, including The Catalyst, those who believed in him.  

Generally, I’m not a fan of ballads. The River started life as a suggestion from Mazen that we include a ballad of some kind on the album, which I initially resisted. But I realized that I didn’t have to write a Diane Warren-type ballad, or something corny, and that the moment called for something stripped down. So Alex and I sat down with a very vague concept of what we needed to achieve, and came up with what I consider to be a very powerful and understated moment on the album. It’s almost entirely just piano and one vocal, whereas I tend towards maximalism in my writing, with layers and layers of orchestration, synths, and vocal harmonies. It’s a bare naked moment for both Sisyphus and me, where he is broken by his own hand, once again at the bottom of the mountain, having pushed the rock all the way to the top, only to fall to the bottom again.

Literal rock bottom.

13. Tempus Fugue:

“Tempus fugit” is a saying that means “time flies”, and a fugue is a musical form. On past In Virtue albums, I have included long-winded overtures of the album’s musical themes (“Underture” and “Afterture” ) that were both ill-conceived and poorly received, self-indulgent. On this album, I wanted the chance to make a meaningful tour de force of the motifs while wrapping up the story and tying it all together. This is the longest song on the album, and covers a lot of ground.

In this song, Sisyphus addresses the futility of time and its cyclical nature, to which he has had the most painfully vivid relationship. He also recognizes the healing power of time, to which we owe his entire redemption cycle, in fact.

He finally comes to an important conclusion about life on earth, and the value of true intention and effort - the work of life. Pushing the rock is something we all do, every day - we wake up and we try. We all have our own boulder and our own hill, and even in the apparent futility of time, we create something meaningful and beautiful from our struggles to ascend to something higher and better than ourselves.

And that we need to forgive ourselves, so we can push the rock again tomorrow.

We once again reprise the “Push that rock back up that hill” mantra.

Features a devastating vocal spot by Chaney Crabb of Entheos.

14. Descent Limitless:

The outro of the album, with the triumphant motif from the intro once again, in its final form, as Sisyphus takes up his boulder, but with new meaning and understanding this time. We hear “The Sound’ one last time as the album wraps.