Song of the Day: “Pachinko, Pt. 1” by Moron Police

Non-stop, singable melodies layered over dizzying technical passages.

Dec 16, 2025

Moron Police’s Pachinko is the kind of progressive rock album that begs the listener a single, very important question: “Why are you taking this so seriously?” This Norwegian outfit has successfully crammed two hours’ worth of genre-bending madness, sugary-sweet melodies, and genuinely staggering musicianship into a nearly hourlong concept album about a guy who somehow becomes a sentient pinball machine in Tokyo... or something like that… I think.

The band, led by Sondre Skollevoll, delivers infectious pop choruses with the complex, breakneck rhythmic shifts of a math rock band that just downed three Monster energy drinks. It’s a joyous, maximalist explosion, navigating everything from jazz fusion to techno breakdowns to tear-jerking ballads, sometimes within the same track. While the sheer density of musical ideas might cause temporary whiplash, the central strength is the songwriting—it’s prog that remembers it should be fun, even when wrestling with themes of agency, capitalism, and existential dread.

The album serves as a towering, ambitious follow-up to their breakthrough, A Boat on the Sea, succeeding largely because it expands the scope without sacrificing the band’s signature, almost cartoonish energy. Drummer Billy Rymer’s performance is particularly noteworthy, providing an endlessly effervescent anchor to the chaos, proving that even in the face of tragedy (the passing of former drummer Thore Pettersen, to whom the album is dedicated), the groove must go on. In a genre often criticized for being too cerebral, Pachinko lyrically tips its hat to the heart amongst an embarrassment of riches in the form of instrumental prowess and technique.

The clear anchor on this record is the album’s eleven-minute, multi-section centerpiece: “Pachinko, Pt. 1.” It manages to be epic and anthemic while somehow maintaining a deeply unpretentious, pop-forward sensibility. The song is the perfect distillation of the album’s concept: beautiful, chaotic, and relentlessly forward-moving, leaving you breathless but inexplicably happy. It’s the track that will either convert the uninitiated or confirm to existing fans that Moron Police aren’t just one of the best prog bands working today (with probably the best band name in prog as well), but arguably the only one that can make existential dread feel this aggressively danceable.