MONTREAL, JUNE 2025 – Canadian phenom Alex Henry Foster makes a powerful return to the Billboard Canadian Albums chart, debuting at #31, and reaches the top spot inthe Palmarès ADISQ Top Sales with his new release, A Nightfall Ritual, while the epic 11-minute opening track, Up Til Dawn, confidently earned its place in Spotify’s Prog Rock editorial playlist.

Fresh off his first concert of the year at the Midsummer Prog Festival in Maastricht, Netherlands, Foster announces The High Booming Ritual Tour, highly anticipated by fans who know that, given his ongoing health challenges, opportunities to see him live may become increasingly rare.

He also unveils a stunning new live video for the track The Pain That Bonds — added to La Presse’s Écoute Sélective playlist, that dives deep into noisy, art rock, and space rock elements, especially in the second half of the song, which might sound like a cry for redemption to some:

The album already has already garnered early support from CREEM Magazine, Prog Magazine, Visions Magazin, WherePostRockDwells, and the Corus Radio network across Canada with his his second single, The Son of Hannah which Alan Cross named Undiscovered Gem of the Week. It displays Foster and his Shadows’ rich, multi-layered wall of sounds with all the passion and mastery they’re now well-known for, defined by a vivid dramatic honesty that comes with the singer’s comeback into the lights after surviving an emergency heart surgery necessitating a double graft two years ago.

The film documents the final show of Foster’s comeback tour and features two radically reimagined versions of songs from his Billboard #4-charting live album Standing Under Bright Lights: The Son of Hannah, which originally premiered at the International Montreal Jazz Festival, and The Pain That Bonds—a 17-minute epic that closes the new album. Interestingly, the song was originally a five-minute opening track on Foster’s Billboard #6-charting debut album Windows in the Sky.

Foster reflects on this new chapter: “The new songs “Up Til Dawn” and “I’m Afraid” are the initial reflection of that resurgent stage, while “The Son of Hannah” represents the first glimpse of conscious awareness I had after the release of my album “Windows in the Sky”, a liberating record whose emancipative voyage began with the bleak reflection that was the song “The Pain That Bonds” before undergoing its emerging hopeful transfiguration.”

The concept of time is also central to the narrative arc of the record: “Some might say that I have assembled the project going backwards, but it couldn’t be more foreign a thought to my vision, as my perspective is neither linear nor subject to any kind of backward revisitation. It is in fact perpetually circular, and even though this may give the impression that I need to return to the starting point again and again to keep on going, my approach is that we redefine each of those markers as we pass through them, creating an ever-increasing distance in time and space every time, like an upward spiral, exponentially evolving, so you never know where the actual starting point is.”

Foster‘s European summer tour spans six countries and includes major progressive rock festivals, showing strong promise following a performance hailed as an “absolute highlight” at the Midsummer Prog Festival in Maastricht, Netherlands. He was also announced for the 10th edition of the prestigious Cruise to the Edge in 2026.

UPCOMING CONCERTS:
23/08/25 — Inowroclaw — Ino-Rock Festival (PL)
28/08/25 — Aschaffenburg — Colos-Saal (DE)
25/08/25 — Prague — Rock Café (CZ)
26/08/25 — Budapest — A38 (HU)
05/09/25 — Revislate — 2Days Prog + 1 Festival (IT)
07/09/25 — Maastricht — Zero for Three Festival (NL)
04/03/26 – 09/03/26 — Miami x Key West x Nassau — Cruise to the Edge (US)

TICKETS INFO