You can read the whole record off its sleeve. Hugh Syme put the Kjeragbolten on it, a block of Norwegian stone jammed in a crevasse between two cliff faces with nothing beneath it but air, and the five-man conservatory that answers to the name Dream Theater could not have chosen a more exact self-portrait: lodged at a dizzying altitude, held fast by its own enormous weight, flawless from every angle and not one inch higher than it stood on the last record. That is the triumph of A View from the Top of the World. It is also the invoice.
Recorded between October 2020 and March 2021 at DTHQ, the band's own headquarters on Long Island and a room in which it had never before made an album, produced by John Petrucci, engineered by James "Jimmy T" Meslin and mixed and mastered by Andy Sneap on his first job with the band, the fifteenth studio album reached the shops through InsideOut on 22 October 2021. Seven tracks, seventy minutes. James LaBrie followed the writing from Canada by video call and flew in to sing in March 2021, and Petrucci, recalling the band's discussions in a three-part interview that Blabbermouth transcribed on 18 September 2021, said the music was "dark, but it was also positive; there's a lot of energy." Both halves of that sentence hold. It went to number one in Finland, two in Germany and 52 on the Billboard 200, the American album chart, and it is the last album with Mike Mangini on drums: Mike Portnoy returned in October 2023, which turns these seventy minutes, without anyone knowing it at the time, into a farewell.
Then the overture. "The Alien" tears the lid off with a fast, frantic, heavy riff and drums hammered into every accent of it, and only when the instruments pull back does LaBrie step into the space they have cleared for him. It is the best opening track the band had written in years, and it was paid in the one currency the industry trusts: on 3 April 2022 it won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance, the band's first after two earlier nominations, ahead of Deftones, Gojira, Mastodon and Rob Zombie.
Two songs in, after that gale, the record does something clever with its pulse. "Invisible Monster" drops to a mid-tempo tread and turns its attention to anxiety, the unseen presence that sits at your shoulder all day, and it is here, with the tempo lowered and the arrangement given room to breathe, that you notice how well LaBrie is singing on this album, placing every phrase the way a chamber singer places a cadence, with care and without hurry. It is the easiest road into the record for anyone who finds twenty-minute suites intimidating. Its video, directed by William "Wombat" Felch, puts the band in front of the camera.
Then, after the monster, the window. "Transcending Time" is the outlier, a bright song in a major key that leans toward the clean, sunlit melodic writing of eighties arena rock, and it is the track the album's listeners will argue over: a lapse into radio comfort to some, to others the one window thrown open in a sealed concert hall where the air has been breathed six times over. It is the window. Seventy minutes that their own guitarist calls dark need exactly that draught.
The heaviest riffs on the album live in "Awaken the Master", and the low string under them does what low strings do to a progressive band: it smashes through the floorboards of the arrangement and drops the whole quintet into the cellar, where the riff sounds enormous. The riff is first rate. The song runs on longer than the riff can pay for, and that is the album's real problem in miniature.
The limit of this record is not invention. It is editing. "Sleeping Giant" packs its verses so densely, and holds them so long, that the ear stops following the counterpoint and starts counting bars, like a fugue played before a strict jury: every entry correct, every voice accounted for, and the tune has quietly slipped out of the hall before the final cadence. Nothing here turns the soil for a band that ploughed so much of it once. This is the confident, riff-heavy sequel to Distance Over Time, the same dense score of unisons and odd metres carried to a higher ledge and played in thinner air, and it asks nothing of you that the previous record had not already asked.
The limit of this record is not invention. It is editing.
And then, at the summit, the album pays its debts in full. The title track runs 20 minutes 24 seconds in three parts, and where a suite of that size so often collapses into a recital of everything its authors can play, this one holds its argument from the first part to the third, the way a long symphonic movement keeps a single theme alive through every development without once letting the orchestra wander off into the abyss of its own technique. It is the last concert hall of the long form that this line-up built, and it stands. In that same interview, transcribed by Blabbermouth on 18 September 2021, Petrucci called the title "pretty damn DREAM THEATER-y". He is right, and the song earns the name.
For the apostles of the long form who want this machine at full pressure, with an opener that won a Grammy and a closing suite that never loses its thread, A View from the Top of the World is seventy minutes that repay the climb, and its two strongest songs belong with the best work of the Mangini years. For anyone waiting for Dream Theater to leap off the rock and find out whether it can fly, nothing happens here, and the middle of the record will test your patience twice. The boulder holds. It is very high and beautifully lit, and it is exactly where it was already lodged.