The Tea Club "Chasm" ALBUM REVIEW [Crossover Prog]

by Dean Wolfe, Prog Dog Media                    released 2025

“You can't handle the truth” was a great line in a great movie, but there's something in that idea that applies to all of us. We like to imagine we're the exception—that we're ready to face whatever truth comes our way.

Chasm feels like a pretty good test of that assumption.

I find Chasm, by The Tea Club, to be a deep album—as deep as the title implies—but it isn't a dangerous place to go. Quite the opposite. I loved it from the get-go. 

It's funny how, historically speaking, artists have sometimes been deemed dangerous by overzealous governments and dictatorships. Maybe it's because art can be so individual and unique—and therefore inherently threatening to any force that demands conformity and uniformity. Art has a way of saying, I see the world differently.

And it's not easy being an artist. Not that an artist necessarily has to suffer in order to create good work, but they often have to work damn hard to bring that work into the world. It's a little like giving birth to something that then needs to be cared for and nurtured until it can stand on its own two feet—and protected along the way from all the harsh elements that might keep it from surviving.

That's one reason the first thing that amazed me about Chasm was how original The Tea Club sound. There are recognizable influences here, of course, but the combination feels distinctly their own. And beneath that originality is an enormous amount of raw energy and forward drive, coupled with these deeper currents of yearning—for connection, for meaning, perhaps even for wholeness.

Chasm is not overly polished, and clearly isn't aiming to please the music machines so much as reach for something beyond and somewhere else. I feel like the more I dig into this album, the more it will reveal itself. It's heartfelt, often bursting with honest energy and emotion, chasing ideas but also taking the time to pause and take stock.

The songwriting is strong and bold. The Tea Club's sound is reminiscent of grunge and ’80s King Crimson/Adrian Belew, with hints of a youthful Sting and The Police. There's also a hint of Metric with a male vocalist. 

There are no long epics here—just short ones. There's lots of bending and building going on here, with a touch of madness. 

If this album got sucked into an AI song-creation algorithm, it would probably become confused and label the whole thing a corrupted file. There are brief moments when Chasm becomes almost anti-melodic, but purposefully so, I suspect—creating contrast with the melodies that emerge around them.

You can hear this particularly well on “Vineyard”. The Tea Club mostly recorded this album as a band playing live off the floor, all analog, rather than surgically piecing performances together at different times and in different places. That sense of musicians interacting in real time comes through. The drums act as the glue, while the chorus winds like a river through unexpected and beautiful chords. It sounds less like a collection of individually constructed parts and more like a proper band listening to and responding to each other in the moment.

If I were a cigar-smoking record exec, I'd be yelling, “I don't hear any hits!”  And this is a good thing. Long live the anti-hits emerging from the antimatter universe. 

There is one curiously arresting track- 'The Lunar Eclipse', a pretty and sweet piano based song that the band reports to having struggled with in the recording phase and in the album track sequencing phase. Putting it last seems the perfect cap or cherry on the top to this adventurous album, and is one of my favourite tracks along with the album opener and 'Vineyard'. 

So, this bold album is not for the timid traveller. It’s for the vigorous and strong prog-at-heart music appreciator—the kind of listener willing to dig in and discover what’s hiding in the chasm. I give it a 4.5 out of 5 dog bones.