RicoBlade

Newark, New Jersey's RicoBlade has been building a sound since 2020 that bridges the gap between progressive metal's compositional ambition and the neoclassical shred tradition, adding ambient textures to give the music an unusual emotional depth beyond pure technical display. Newark, a city with a gritty underdog character, lends a certain grounded intensity to RicoBlade's otherwise cerebral approach — this is intricate music with genuine feeling behind the fretwork. The ambient elements in particular give their progressive/shred work a cinematic scope rarely found in this subgenre.