Track By Tracks: Redshift - Down The Wire (2026)

1. The Routine:

Our story begins as our hero, an artist, loses all their work to AI. The routine summarises the feeling of anger, sadness, loss, and hopelessness, as the world is turned upside down, with all types of art being replaced by AI-generated words, music, and images. This is where we choose to take a stand. Vocally, this song is very different and probably the trickiest to get how we wanted it, a lot of harmonies and odd phrasing, but it also ends with some of the most epic vocals. After the solo, it gets pretty hectic, and you're hit with some pretty rapid-fire riffs, and it feels like a lot is going on in a short space of time. It purposely feels a bit claustrophobic.

2. The Singer:

The singer explores the way that AI-generated articles, false videos, and voices can influence the world around us and can be used to weaponize social and political opinion. Our hero is trying to draw this to public attention, taking to social media and making his voice heard. The singer is the voice of AI, telling us what we all want to hear. I think this song sits right in the ballpark of all our influences. It blends everything from the past, present, and future really well. It was the first song we wrote with Tiago, and I think it’s still one of the best. One of our favorite keyboard solos, too.

3. The Machine:

The machine is the embodiment and consciousness of AI, showing how far-reaching and how effective its presence is throughout the media. This is where we learn the tools to be able to exploit it and start using more social media, tools, and bots, to get more views and make the hypocritical message that AI is bad. This is my favorite chorus on the album, I love it when you can make odd times feel so melodic that you don’t realise it’s not 4. Instrumentally, the first half of this song is a challenge. It’s very intense, fast, shifting meters constantly, and has some of the craziest guitar and bass unisons.

4. The Clown:

This song highlights how we are all participating into AIs influence, everybody watches the AI slop on social media, and uses AI to answer questions where we should be trying to engage our brains. We brought out the accordion, mandolin, horns, banjo, and slide acoustic guitar for this one. It’s compact, still proggy, fun, and has one of my favourite solos on the album. We like having these fun satirical moments on the record to break it up.

5. The Rogue:

This is where our main character pushes back and starts getting a real following. This is the most diverse song on the album. From fusion to Latin, death metal to psychedelic rock. We also had John Hare lay down a trumpet solo, and we had the amazing Derek Sherinian lay down 2 keyboard solos on this one.

6. The Redemption:

This song is split into 3 parts. The first part focuses on how this resistance is gathering momentum, the second part focuses on how the character loses himself within all this popularity and starts to get a god complex as he starts believing in his own hype, and the final part is just saying the best way to get through it is to disconnect. We went into this basically wanting to write the best Redshift song. We knew it had to be epic, but it also had to contain everything that this band does. It has some of the heaviest parts, but it also has the best melodic section we’ve ever written.

Support independent metal journalism — Visit the official BTC store