Seventh Wonder

Seventh Wonder are a Swedish progressive metal band from Stockholm, formed in 2000 after the members' previous group fell apart. The founding core was bassist Andreas Blomqvist, guitarist Johan Liefvendahl and drummer Johnny Sandin; keyboardist Andreas "Kyrt" Söderin joined late the same year and cemented the band's progressive direction. Blomqvist has remained the band's constant bassist and one of its principal songwriters since day one. Two demos followed, Seventh Wonder (2001) and Temple in the Storm (2003), during a period of vocalist instability that saw Ola Halén and then Andi Kravljaca front the group. Kravljaca sang on the 2005 debut album Become, released through the Finnish label Lion Music. The band's decisive turn came in 2005, when Tommy Karevik — previously of Vindictiv — took over the microphone. His clean, wide-ranging and unusually melodic delivery, paired with Blomqvist's busy bass work and Söderin's keyboards, became the group's signature. Waiting in the Wings (2006) was Karevik's first album with the band and drew markedly better reviews than the debut, establishing Seventh Wonder in the international progressive metal scene. Their landmark remains Mercy Falls (2008), an ambitious concept album following a protagonist who lies in a coma after an accident, moving between his real life and an imagined world. It is widely treated by fans and reviewers as the band's defining statement and the record most often used to introduce newcomers to them. The Great Escape (2010) pushed further still, closing with a roughly thirty-minute title track inspired by Harry Martinson's poem cycle Aniara — the band's first song to exceed ten minutes. Sandin left in 2010 and was replaced by drummer Stefan Norgren in 2011. In June 2012 Karevik was announced as the new singer of Kamelot, succeeding Roy Khan. He stated at the time that he had no intention of leaving Seventh Wonder, and the two commitments ran in parallel — but Kamelot's heavier touring and release schedule is generally credited with the long silence that followed. Seventh Wonder issued no new studio album for almost eight years, filling part of the gap with the live release Welcome to Atlanta Live 2014 after signing to Frontiers Records in 2016. Tiara (2018) ended the drought and was received as a genuine return to form, followed by The Testament (2022), a tighter and more direct record and the last to feature Karevik, who announced his departure on 12 June 2023. The band has continued with a new vocalist alongside Blomqvist, Liefvendahl, Söderin and Norgren. Among progressive metal listeners Seventh Wonder enjoy a reputation out of proportion to their commercial size: a musicians' band admired for melodic songwriting that never sacrifices hooks to technicality, for Blomqvist's prominent bass, and above all for Karevik-era vocal performances that are frequently cited among the genre's best.