Progressive metal band Gladiolus is turning heads with their debut album, Inertia. Formed by guitarist and vocalist Dan Hendrex and multi-instrumentalist Anson Nesci, Gladiolus blends elements from classic prog influences with modern djent and atmospheric metal, creating a sound that’s at once familiar and refreshingly unique. Their music is heavily inspired by pioneering bands like Karnivool, Devin Townsend, and Opeth, yet Gladiolus forges a distinct sound through dense vocal harmonies, ambient soundscapes, and layered instrumental passages.

In this interview, Dan discusses the paths that led each member to join forces, the journey of creating Inertia—a project years in the making—and their thoughts on the evolving progressive metal scene. Dan reflects on the personal musical evolution that ignited his love for prog metal and the collaborative process with Anson and the rest of the band. Read on to discover the story behind Inertia and what makes Gladiolus a band to watch in the world of progressive metal.

Describe your personal musical journeys that led to Gladiolus.

Dan: I’ve always been a musical being – I’d listen to pretty much anything growing up, and I’d always fall asleep with the radio on. Stuff like Jet, Live, Powderfinger, Linkin Park, Alien Ant Farm, The Gorillaz and System of a Down shaped the soundtrack of my early childhood.

I picked up guitar around age 10 and kinda coasted for a while, but then a friend showed me prog metal at 16… I latched on pretty much immediately. Hearing Tool for the first time really kickstarted an actual deeper interest in guitar and music as a whole. Some other friends through the following few years put me onto bands such as Karnivool, Twelve Foot Ninja, Caligula’s Horse, Devin Townsend and Periphery, and I was hooked. 

Seeing that influx of people recording music that sounded good in their bedroom around 2013-14, I figured “why not give it a shot?” I bought a shitty guitar link cable from some store and downloaded a free DAW with some trial plugins, just to mess around. At some point, I saved up enough from my job at Bunnings to pick up something a little more serious, and bought myself an AX8. The stuff I was writing at the start was pretty average, but practice, time and inspiration by seeing so many cool bands in Brisbane inspired more interesting compositions.

How did you both first connect and what made you want to work together?

Dan: Eventually, the approach turned from “hey, this is fun” to “hey, what if I actually tried to write some original music and release it? That’d be a cool story to tell at the old folks home when I’m 72” and so I put some feelers out to see if anyone wanted to collaborate.

It was a bit of a revolving door at the start, until Anson got in touch with me around 2017. He’d just moved back up to Brisbane from Melbourne, and saw a post I’d put up on a Facebook group looking for musicians with an early demo of Inertia attached. We clicked pretty much immediately, and quickly started piecing the bones of the album together as a team. It was so easy to bounce ideas off of Anson, so I knew I’d struck gold with that connection – a real camaraderie that you just know from minute one is going to be a lifelong friendship.

We met Joe through one of the earlier band members, and we shot him some demos. A week later we took our gear down to his place and auditioned him. Same deal, pretty much instant broship was formed. Dude’s just so chill, and he’s got the chops to throw around when he needs to! Tracking with him has been a breeze, and every time we ask for a little bit of Joe secret sauce on top, he delivers in spades.

Anson and I were both studying at Griffith University in the Gold Coast at the time – I studied Mechanical Engineering, and Anson was completing his Bachelor in Popular Music. We used the space to record some tracks and hone our skills, submitting some as production assignments for Anson’s courses. Zak was in Anson’s cohort at the time, and we all bonded from our love of prog metal, stopping to chat as we passed by each other roaming the halls and studios. He helped us with our first drum engineering session, and I jumped in to assist him with composing some pieces for his assessments. The slot opened up and it just made sense to us. We already connected really well and his style melded perfectly with the tracks we’d put together for Inertia, so we asked him to come aboard!

Reflect on realizing Gladiolus’ debut album Inertia.

Dan: It was a very gruelling process. I started demoing stuff around 2016 on my own, and had large swathes of the album’s tracks mostly together by the time the others had joined. Anson came in towards the tail end of the main writing sessions and helped contribute to the structures of a bunch of existing songs, as well as giving us the entire structures of what became Disintegrator and The Wanderer. We demoed out pretty much the whole album as Joe joined, and then go to tracking drums, bass and rhythm guitars.

We went through a couple of vocalists to try and find what was the right fit, and it took probably 1-2 years of trying out different angles before the boys pushed me to give it a shot myself. There was a lot of momentum loss due to people joining/leaving at critical moments. Once we had a stable lineup, the pandemic hit. We all got very busy as well… Anson got married, we all finished school and moved multiple times, and life got in the way of us completing the album. 

We’d find gaps of time to get together and collaborate, but since it had been so long since we started, a lot of the momentum (or maybe you could say… Inertia?) had been lost. We’d also spent a large amount of time thinking about the intent of the album, and moulding its intricacies to convey the right emotions and progressions. 

Lead guitars and vocals were the last things to be done, and didn’t fully come together until early this year. I think the main reason those took so long was fear. I’m pretty new to being a vocalist, and I was TERRIFIED of ruining the record with bad vocal delivery/melody or cringey lyrics, so it took a lot of deliberate collaboration with Anson to shape those elements. A lot of what was needed was already in my head, but because I was so new to vocals, I really needed that extra brain to bounce things off of and affirm my feelings towards what made sense harmonically and structurally. 

The same can be said for lead guitars, which were very much so a collaborative effort between Zak and myself. We both worked hard to build parts that fit sonically with the established structures and provide additional dimensions to them, while also allowing space for the vocals to stand out where needed.

Describe the creative process for Inertia.

Dan: Most of the album was constructed during our time together at university. Anson would come hang out and sometimes sleep on my couch, and we’d just chill out. We’d have a session open in Reaper and just play with different ideas or noodle until something stood out as interesting, and then try and develop it further with stream-of-consciousness part creation/layering. After enough time experimenting and chopping/changing, we built the rhythmic and structural skeletons of the songs. We used synth and drum sampling plugins to lay down the foundations of those parts as well.

Lead guitars and some very vague ideas for vocal progressions were constructed along with these initial demoes. Joe took the drum parts we’d made and tried his best to learn them, while changing them if they didn’t make sense or spicing them up where some sauce was needed. A lot of the intricacies of the drums were developed in the studio whilst we were tracking them. We’d tracked drums at university, but we felt we could get a better source tone so we rented out Studio Circuit for three days, and Joe absolutely smashed through the whole album’s recording. Poor bugger thought he was done, and then we made him do it again!

Vocals and lead guitars were done ad-hoc at multiple locations… Anson and I would trade off the travel, meeting up at one anothers’ places with the vocal gear to smash out some layers when we had time. Similarly, Zak and I caught up when we could to try and shape the lead parts together. Some of it was done solo, but we’d pretty much always meet up and do the final takes with one of us engineering the other.

Tell me about the different instrumental aspects that you explore on these new songs.

Dan: Inertia is very much so a record that celebrates all the pillars of what makes prog so interesting. A lot of our sound is rooted in the vibes that you can find in progressive rock and metal from the mid-00s to early-10s, but we’re not afraid to poke our heads out of that box when it feels right.

We’ve got a lot of modern djenty-sounding tonalities that might be likened to Periphery or Tesseract in tracks like Myopic and The Precipice, but you’ll also find more atmospheric/textural soundscapey stuff ala Devin Townsend/Porcupine Tree/Karnivool in tracks like Tremors and Inertia. Disintegrator was a fun little foray into a more post-metal/desert rock sound, and we played with duelling stereo guitar solos that wrap around each other in The Wanderer. You’ll find our longer compositions evolve and shift a lot, and we love to play with textures and dynamics to move the listener where we want them to be emotionally.

The album is peppered with bucketloads of vocal layering, to really fill in the sonic space and make the high points massive. We utilise a lot of reverb on guitars and synth pads to evoke certain feelings as well, such as the dip after the second chorus in Tremors, the soaring chorus of Inertia or the ending of Downtrodden.

Inertia was very much so an journey of exploration/self-discovery, and we think that the tracks on the record reflect that in their juxtapositions with each other.

What is your opinion about the progressive metal scene today, both in Australia and worldwide? 

Dan:  Metal has seemingly experienced a massive resurgence in the public eye over the last few years. Maybe the pandemic brought people’s willingness to explore more intense emotions out, or maybe it’s just the fabled 20-year cycle that fashion/trends are rumoured to go through, but it’s really exciting either way. We have bands like Bring Me The Horizon and Knocked Loose leading the charge in showing the larger population just how good heavy music can be, and it’s super awesome to see those gates being pried open again. You simply wouldn’t see stuff like Megan Thee Stallion’s collab with Spiritbox or Doja Cat’s rock/metal adaption of Say So pre-pandemic!

It’s also really exciting to see the boundaries of what defines metal being challenged in ways we haven’t seen in yonks. The early 2010s gave way to a new wave of metal with djent and the accessibility of bedroom recording gear, and I think that we’re seeing a similar level of genre-shift happening before our eyes now. You have bands like Loathe and Thornhill bringing back a lot of the timbres/tonalities that we loved in the early 00s nu-metal, reminding people why we loved Deftones and Limp Bizkit so much back then, and you’ve got the resurgence of 80s synthwave, 90s electronica and 2010s EDM sliding into metal through bands like Northlane and Haken. Sleep Token are bringing RnB into the mix in a way I’ve never seen in the genre before, and Bilmuri are making f**king COUNTRY tracks with breakdowns that make me wanna scream HELL YEAH BROTHER!

There’s never been a better time to be a metal fan if you ask me. There’s such a broad range of stylistic exploration happening, and people merging genres together that seem like they should be the antithesis of each other. It’s no wonder that we’re seeing an increased interest in the scene – I love it so much and I’m all for it. It’s so f**king prog, man.

Let me know about your influences — the artists that in a way shaped and continue to shape your music.

Dan: We’ve been inspired by so much music that it can be hard to pick key influences to our sound sometimes, but there’ a few stand-outs that are definitely worth a mention. 

Karnivool have always been a favourite of ours. We love the way they build their songs to tell a story and convey emotions so effectively. The push and pull of their compositions are unmatched, and a huge inspiration to our music. We also love their approach to guitars, with there often not being a clear-cut lead/rhythm separation, using stereo guitars playing equally important parts to add layers without one necessarily being more up-front than the other. Their ability to allow the rhythm section to breathe and drive songs is also something we strive to be even half as good at!

We draw inspiration from bands like Opeth, Caligula’s Horse and Porcupine Tree for similar reasons. I think a lot of the tracks we have that are through-composed or built with multiple separate parts such as Flicker, The Wanderer and Inertia are all informed in some way by how these bands navigate these challenges in their own compositions. Tracks like Ghost of Perdition, Graves and Anaesthetize come to mind when thinking about this.

Devin Townsend’s music has always been extremely inspiring to me, and his world-class vocal abilities are what I try to emulate with my own vocals. We utilise a lot of similar techniques in layering of backing tracks. I’ll record 4+ takes of each harmonic layer, and we’ll pan them to give a choir-like effect. We also love his use of reverb tails and how they feed into his music’s distinct vibe – definitely something we’ve taken to doing as well with big synth pads and massive verb tails on guitars/vocals.

We love a bit of sludge and grind every now and then, and we can’t think of better bands that capture this aesthetic than The Ocean and Cult of Luna. Both strongly influence areas of Inertia that delve into the muddier side of metal – tracks like Disintegrator and the end of Inertia really lean into this vibe. It’s something that really came into the picture with Anson’s involvement in production, and I’m so glad for it. Really keen to play with these tonalities more in the future.

What are your top 5 records of all time?

Dan: This is a cruel question. You can’t make me pick favourites! I’ll try for you though. In no particular order:

• Karnivool – Sound Awake
• Devin Townsend – Ki
• Meshuggah – Nothing
• The Ocean – Phanerozoic I
• Caligula’s Horse – In Contact

Besides the release of Inertia, are there any other plans for the future?

Dan: It’s been a long road getting to the release of Inertia, so we’re keen to bask in the satisfaction of its completion for a bit. That said, I don’t think we’re gonna be able to keep ourselves away from the temptation of writing. I’m excited to get back into the chair at home and put some songs together for fun, then see where that might naturally lead us once we’ve got a few demos under our belt. Who knows what the next release will look like – I don’t wanna put a label on it just yet!

Playing some more shows definitely isn’t off the cards, either. We’ll jump at pretty much any opportunity to get up onstage and share our tunes with a live audience… hopefully we can book a few gigs interstate soon! That’d be awesome.

Check out Inertia on Bandcamp. Gladiolus are on Instagram and Facebook.