The third Conception album is the one their own listeners rank highest, the one a magazine put among the best progressive metal records of its decade thirty years later, and the one where the keyboards carry as much weight as the guitars.

The short version

In Your Multitude was released in 1995 by Noise, catalogue N 0229-2; no exact date is documented anywhere consulted. It was recorded and mixed at Stairway to Heaven Studio, pre-mastered there and mastered at PolyGram. Tommy Newton produced, engineered and mixed it, and also plays additional guitar on one track. Trond Nagell-Dahl replaces Hans Chr. Gjestvang on keyboards and is credited with the pre-production, the only such credit in the catalogue. Noise released it in Germany; no dedicated Japanese pressing of this album has been traced.

A new keyboard player and the album everyone points to

Nagell-Dahl’s arrival changes the balance of the band. The keyboards here are written into the structures rather than laid over them. It is also the record where the writing spreads out: Khan takes two co-writing credits with Østby, Heimdal takes one with him on the third track, and two further tracks are credited to Østby, Heimdal and Amlien together. Tommy Newton produced for the second time and, unusually, played on the record as well; he also mastered it with Wilhelm Makkee, and Stefano Scheiba assisted on the engineering.

The sound

Dark, keyboard-led progressive metal. This is the album where the pieces of the band lock together, and the keyboards carry as much of the harmonic weight as the guitars. The writing is spread more widely than on any other Conception record, with four of the ten tracks carrying a credit for somebody other than Østby alone. English lyrics throughout, and no track is documented as an instrumental.

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The songs

‘Missionary Man’, second on the record, is one of only two tracks carrying a Khan writing credit alongside Østby’s. ‘Guilt’, fourth, is the track Tommy Newton plays additional guitar on. ‘Some Wounds’, seventh, is credited to Østby, Heimdal and Amlien; the ninth track carries the same three-way credit. The title track closes the record, and is Østby’s.

Reception and legacy

This is the best-received Conception album by a clear margin: a community average of just over 4 out of 5 from around a hundred and twenty ratings on ProgArchives, the largest number of votes any Conception album has attracted there, where Mellotron Storm calls it the proggiest album the band ever did and greenback also awards four stars. In 2025 the American site Loudwire ranked it the twelfth best progressive metal album of the 1990s. No chart placing or sales figure has been found for it in any territory, which is the pattern for everything the band released on Noise. All four of the 1990s albums were reissued in remastered form in September 2022, through Noise and BMG.

The verdict

If you are going to hear one Conception album, the band’s own audience has spent thirty years pointing at this one, and they are right. It is the record where the four of them and Nagell-Dahl sound like a single instrument, where Khan is at his most controlled, and where the writing is strongest from front to back. Nothing on it is showy, and nothing on it is padded. That is why it has lasted longer than the records around it, why the band’s own audience keeps returning to it thirty years on, and why a comeback made a quarter of a century later still had an audience waiting for it.

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