Riverside

Riverside built modern progressive rock’s most consistent European catalog from Warsaw — melancholic, warm, and unhurried, closer to Porcupine Tree’s lineage than to metal’s. The 2016 death of guitarist Piotr Grudziński would have ended most bands; they turned grief into their best-received work.

In the atlas they hold Poland’s other flank: the introspective counterweight to Behemoth’s fire.