GuideHidden Gems

The Most Underrated Prog Rock Bands

Prog rock’s canon leans on a short list of names — the titans every playlist reaches for first. But whole bands, not just deep cuts by famous ones, have spent decades doing first-rate work outside the spotlight. Some arrived a scene too late, some got tangled in label politics at the wrong moment, some simply came from a country or decade the standard prog story rarely mentions. Here are six bands whose catalogs reward the attention usually reserved for household names.

Comus

Formed in London in 1969, Comus made one of the UK’s most singular folk-prog records: First Utterance (1971), built from acoustic guitars, violin, and hand percussion pushed into a raw atmosphere critics call closer to folk-horror than the pastoral sound “folk” usually implies. It made little commercial impact, and the band drifted apart soon after a quieter 1974 follow-up, To Keep from Crying. Decades later, reviewers began treating it as one of the era’s more distinctive folk-prog records, its influence surfacing in music by the modern band Opeth. Comus reformed in 2008 and 2009, releasing a third album, Out of the Coma, in 2012, to a more measured reception than the debut’s cult status.

Nektar

Nektar formed in Hamburg, West Germany, in 1969, though the entire lineup was English — too German for British-scene histories, too British for the Krautrock ones. In 1973 their fourth album, Remember the Future, a continuous concept piece across two long sides, reached number 19 on the Billboard 200 in the US, and the band spent the mid-1970s building a substantial American touring following. That foothold rarely survives a decade of lineup changes, and Nektar’s did not: by the 1980s its US profile had faded to a cult one, even as the early albums kept a devoted following among collectors. A version of the band remains active today, still rooted in the 1973 breakthrough’s sound.

Gryphon

Gryphon formed in London in 1972 around an unlikely idea: a progressive rock band built from medieval instruments — bassoon, crumhorn, recorder — alongside guitars and drums. It worked well enough that Yes brought the band along as an opening act on a large tour of North America and the UK between November 1974 and May 1975. Gryphon released five studio albums between 1973 and 1977, moving from courtly instrumentals toward longer, heavier compositions, before splitting in 1977 as momentum stalled and punk rewrote the UK’s priorities. It took 32 years to play together again, a one-off London reunion in 2009 that led to new albums in 2018 and 2020 — being hard to classify may be exactly why they rarely make best-of lists.

Pallas

Pallas are a Scottish band from Aberdeen, a standard-bearer of the early-1980s neo-prog revival alongside better-known names like Marillion — their bass player reached out to Marillion’s singer through a magazine ad, leading to a joint UK tour that built both followings. Their debut, Arrive Alive, was a cassette-only release in 1981, later pressed on vinyl in 1983. The best-known record, The Sentinel (1984), was meant as one continuous piece, the Atlantis Suite, but the label broke it up with shorter, commercial songs, pushing material onto B-sides. A 1992 reissue restored something closer to the original sequencing, though the album still divides critics. Worse timing followed: 1987’s The Wedge sold well across Europe before the label withdrew all promotion amid internal staff changes, leaving Pallas dormant for years before a 1999 comeback. The band remains active today.

Djam Karet

Djam Karet formed in 1984 at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and has stayed active for four decades — almost entirely without a hit or a famous name in the lineup. The band works in fully instrumental territory, blending jam-rock improvisation, psychedelia, world-music textures, and ambient electronics into music that avoids conventional song structure. The specialist press noticed early: Electronic Musician named 1987’s The Ritual Continues among its albums of the year, and Rolling Stone called 1989’s Reflections from the Firepool a top independent release, though none of it led to mainstream traction. Djam Karet signed to Cuneiform Records in 1997, building a catalog of nearly twenty albums far better known to instrumental-prog listeners than to prog fans generally.

Änglagård

Änglagård formed in Sweden in 1991, part of a small wave of bands reviving 1970s-style symphonic prog at a moment when the style had been commercially out of fashion for a decade. Their debut, Hybris (1992), pairs dense, Mellotron-heavy instrumental passages with vocals, and the entirely instrumental follow-up, Epilog (1994), pushed further into the same intense, folk-tinged style. Both were voted album of the year in prog-fan polls, and Hybris has only gained ground since: a 2018 ProgArchives ranking placed it at number 20 on the site’s all-time studio-albums list, the highest of any 1990s release. Yet the band broke up within three years, reunited only briefly in 2002 and 2003, and didn’t return in earnest until 2009, releasing a third album, Viljans Öga, in 2012. It remains known almost exclusively within the prog-listening community, despite being, by its own voting, one of the era’s best-regarded acts.

Where to start

New to this list? Nektar’s Remember the Future is the friendliest way in — the one album here that genuinely charted, so it plays like the era’s more famous prog without asking for extra patience. From there, Änglagård’s Hybris shows why the dedicated prog community rates it so highly, and Pallas’s The Sentinel, in its fuller 1992 sequencing, shows what label interference actually cost a promising band.