As the lone studio guitarist on Protest the Hero’s new Within album – the Canadian progressive-metal veterans’ first in six years – Luke Hoskin multi-tracked wizardly scale runs and dizzyingly arpeggiated harmonies by the boatful.
Hoskin admits he loves guitar heroics, and it’s been a major part of the act’s sound over the past couple of decades. Despite this, the writing phase of Within found the shredder scaling back his most masochistic whims – not for his own sake, but rather for fellow co-founder Tim MacMillar and touring member Ben Davis, the two guitarists tasked with actually recreating Hoskin’s fretboard bedlam on stage. After he sent out the first few demos, his bandmates politely asked him to chill.
“It was definitely a check. Like, ‘That is too fast… the bpm needs to come back on that,’” he says, explaining that he also excised a few ripping but ultimately unnecessary sections that would’ve got buried beneath the roaring vibrato of vocalist Rody Walker. “I got a lot of feedback from Tim and Rody, and it was a reminder to think about Ben, who has to carry the torch live. You have to exercise some restraint; you can’t go nuts and be like, ‘I never have to be in front of an audience doing this.’”
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Within remains a knuckle-busting endeavor. Mouthpiece, Fishhook and Grandfather’s Axe offer an ambitious and often blistering splatter of progressive heaviness, pure-speed pop-punk-isms and power-metal bombast. Up until formally retiring from the road in 2021, Hoskin would have been hitting those licks on stage with MacMillar.
But a few years back – despite his show experience with Protest the Hero – a towering sense of anxiety began to grip the guitarist whenever he thought about performing live. Hoskin hasn’t toured with the band since before they put out 2020’s Palimpsest. He’s totally fine with that – thriving, even.
“Part of the reason for me leaving is that I stopped loving performing,” he says, reiterating that his passion lies with writing and recording. “I did the live side for a long time, because I thought it was a necessary part to facilitate me being able to write music.”
Hoskin, MacMillar and Walker have been together since they were teenagers, initially forming in Whitby, Ontario, under the name Happy Go Lucky in 1999 before rebranding as Protest the Hero in 2001. They wanted to keep up the creative connection, which is how Hoskin arrived at the idea of continuing with two distinct versions of the Protest the Hero.
For Within, the studio band included chief songwriter and guitarist Hoskin, bassist Cameron McLelland and drummer Nathan Bulla. MacMillar and Davis are the guitar tandem on the road, and they’re supported by the rhythm section of bassist Henry Selva and drummer Matt Kidby. Walker handles vocals for both entities.
“The band was so receptive about having a two-pronged approach,” Hoskin says with relief, “I felt like, Oh, cool, I don’t have to completely exit altogether.”
Still, there’s a natural downside to having Hoskin off the road; MacMillar is bummed to no longer be traveling the world with one of his best buds, who just so happens to kill on guitar. Davis, of fellow Canadian progressive unit the Kindred, stepped into the fold as their live lead guitarist in 2022. “Those were big shoes to fill,” MacMillar says. “We got really lucky that we found someone who could knock it out of the park live.”
Davis has been devoted to locking into the lines as laid out by Hoskin’s dexterous studio performances. Hoskin tried to keep track of his playing throughout the sessions while mapping things out through Guitar Pro software; he also runs sheet music publishing company Sheet Happens, and a member of his team went through the recording stems to double check the accuracy of the tabs.
While Hoskin and Davis share a fretboard aesthetic, MacMillar jokes that the guitarists’ similarities extend beyond their playing. “Ben kind of looks like a smaller version of Luke, so on his first tour people thought it was Luke. And we gave him Luke’s signature [Ibanez LHM1] guitar to play as well, so people would come up and be like, ‘Hey Luke, good job!’”
The Within sessions found the studio band tracking their parts at various home-recording spaces around Canada and the U.S. Armed with a grip of Evertune-loaded Ibanez guitars, Hoskin recorded his parts in Boulder, Colorado, under the supervision of Good Tiger member Derya Nagle. Through his hands, the album flows from shred-locked complexity (Mouthpiece) toward orchestral passages peppered with polyrhythmic natural harmonics (i. above).
Punk is also a huge part of Protest the Hero’s latest LP. The lyrics to Liberty Spike recall the days when they would head to their local mall to buy NOFX and Pennywise T-shirts. The chord-forward, speed-barrier-pushing melodicism of Fishhook is indebted to their love of Canadian punk progressives Propagandhi.
“That’s one of the pillars of what we do – fast, fun and melodic,” Hoskin says of the influence, MacMillar confirming of the track’s hectic pace, “Fishhook is at 190bpm, that fast spot where there’s a lot of 16th-note palm-muting.”
Hoskin continues: “We idolized those bands and learned everything we could about what they were doing and how they were approaching songwriting. I grew out of that at some point and got more into metal. I came back to punk in my late twenties realizing the songcraft is unbelievable.”
A more self-referential moment on the album arrives with Grandfather’s Axe, an “all fucking throttle” bang-out that finds vocalist Walker challenging his bandmates to step up their game, in-song (“Play that fuckin’ riff, you dickhead/I wanna hear it sing”). Its title alludes to the Theseus paradox, an ages-old philosophical question around whether or not a boat that’s been stripped and rebuilt one piece at a time remains the same ship over time. “It’s an analogy for the band,” Hoskin theologizes.
In obvious ways, Protest the Hero are not the same band they used to be. It’s been more than a quarter century since they formed, and members have come and gone since the early Noughties. The current two-lineup approach means both iterations experience their time in Protest the Hero in vastly different ways. It’s perhaps the spirit of friendship that ties things together and keeps the progsters afloat.
“The term ‘It takes a village’ keeps coming up… I think the future of the band is a village,” Hoskin says while not only contemplating the path forward with Protest the Hero’s two lineups, but the friends and collaborators that are helping the band plug along behind the scenes. In other words, there’s a lot of people helping right the ship.
Hoskin concludes with gratitude, “The only way it can exist is to embrace the help and talents of all the brilliant people that we know.”
