Following on from their 2025 release Love, The Flower Kings return with a new album that promotes the message that there is hope for the world. Their previous album carried the message “love could change everything if we stopped doing stupid things,” and now we’re told that if we put aside the lusting for wealth and power which produces conflict, then there’s hope for the world. There’s less of the sense of melancholia which pervaded their previous release.
This is an album which is both ambitious and epic on the grand scale, consisting of only four pieces of music, though the two longest tracks are divided into three and five parts respectively. There’s a blend of two longer, more complex tunes which run for something like forty-eight minutes between them, alongside two shorter, slightly punchier tunes running for a mere ten minutes. The result is an album bristling with some of the finest music the Kings have come up with for some time. As mainman Roine Stolt says, “After 37 years, I’d never have dreamt we’d be making one of our finest albums in 2026.” Hope is easily on a par with the best work of The Flower Kings. The music is concise, well performed and the sentiment expressed in the message is heartwarming.
The nineteen-minute ‘The Final Curtain’ opens the album and is divided into three sections, beginning with an instrumental which is redolent of Transatlantic. Overall it’s an excellent piece of music with superb keyboards from Lalle Larsson, whose fine playing is one of the central features of the album. It’s followed by a much shorter piece, the delightful ‘In A World Of Fools’, a slightly catchier tune with pop elements, where we’re told to “hold your head high, keep the light alive in a world of fools.” The even shorter ‘Mars & Minerva’ (Roman gods of war and wisdom respectively) is a pulsating piece of music, dominated by another fine synth solo from Lalle Larsson.
The album’s centrepiece is ‘Gods Of Rome’, an epic divided into five parts. Despite its length and occasional complexity, it’s an accessible piece of music right the way through, with elements of pop, prog and symphonic rock alongside some beautifully evolved musical parts. There’s lots of good soloing, with Roine Stolt and Larsson well to the fore with scintillating performances, though everyone in the band performs superbly. During parts three and four, Roine Stolt intones, “there are no chosen ones, just fools who live by the gun.”
Hope is an album which, with two tracks running to almost fifty minutes, is asking a lot of the listener, but it’s one which rewards the listener, because part of the Kings’ skill set is their ability to play what appears to be simple and easy music yet, when listened to closely, is actually quite complex. They possess the virtuosity of Yes but without the intense complexity of Gentle Giant. Hope bristles with everything the Kings are renowned for, and it’s absolutely one for the prog fan who harkens back to the great bands of the 1970s, from whom the Kings draw their main influences.
