Moron Police – Pachinko

A Pachinko is a Japanese arcade gambling machine where countless tiny metal balls bounce through a maze of pins, colors, lights and noise. Everything about it is chaos. You feed it, you watch the balls rolling everywhere without any clue where they’re going to land. It’s random, hypnotic, overwhelming, absurd. And it just fits all too well as the emotional metaphor at the core of this album, and I think it also resembles the music, not only of this, the latest release of the Norwegians Moron Police, but their discography as a whole.

Being “the Pachinko” becomes a symbol of losing control, being thrown around by life while trying to find meaning inside a system (or just life?) that doesn’t care who you are. When you place that image next to what Moron Police went through, the emotional weight behind the surrealist lyrics seem to become clear (at least from my subjective point of view). After the tragic loss of their drummer and irreplaceable friend, Thore Omland Pettersen, to an absurd traffic accident back in 2022, surviving as human beings, friends, band members, must have been going to hell and back. Thankfully the band decided to come back and in what form! Helping them with the drums for this album and perfectly executed was none other than Billy Rymer (The Dillinger Escape Plan).

But let’s have a quick overview of the first part of the album, which it seems not to be isolated but very much part of the same emotional rollercoaster (imagine a rollercoaster designed by S. Dalí). These tracks explore themes of burnout, nostalgia, identity loss, manipulation and quiet grief, using the Norwegian band’s characteristic mix of sincerity and deliciously wry humour. These songs establish a sense of instability and introspection in the quiet before the absurdity breaks loose. It is the honest jump before falling into a surreal cosmic weirdness that is not easy to understand at a first listen. Because of this, I’m really thankful that the promo kit included the lyrics, because without them, I wouldn’t have been able to grasp the spirit behind this magnificent, crazy, brilliant album.

Crazy, but well thought through. As surreal its lyrical world is, the music ties wonderfully to every meaning Sondre Skollevoll and Lars Christian Bjørknes infused on this masterpiece (with the little help of Jon Ivar Kollbotn from fellow brothers-in-music Major Parkinson, yes the Norwegian prog-scene is a big family! – check those names on the guest musicians list).

Musically, Moron Police is such a different band! Very few out there quite like them. For me, it is very difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t know them how they’re able to mix playfulness, harmonic choirs, intricate melodic and rhythmic patterns with super catchy melodies, orchestra, blast beats, 90s TV Sitcom intro, brass winds, soaring keyboard soundscapes, 80s pop, pure progressive metal and much more… in such a magnificent and cohesive way? How can you define the music style of a band with this description? It is simply impossible. For me, it is just PROG, in capital letters, the epitome of progressive rock (spiced with a lot of progmetal). Hence for me, they’re one of the few progressive rock & metal bands out there that have the luxury of sounding like whatever they want, and trust me, it is always superb!

That’s why I was so happy with their return, and I was not disappointed! In fact, now in November 2025, as I write this a couple of days before the album release after having listened to this album in a loop for several days, my previous affirmation that I had 2 albums topping my personal list of the best of 2025 is not valid anymore: …and then there were 3 albums I can’t decide which I like the most. They’re all different, but Moron Police’s Pachinko brought to the top that what was missing among the best of the music I love: the positive arising from darkness, the playfulness, the skilful crazy mix of everything you can only find in progressive music, the rock and the metal with melodies and beauty in one single go. I’m absolutely besotted with this album, that when it is not playing on my speakers, it is in my head. Thank you Sondre, Lars, Christian for the massive earworms constantly devouring my brain!

‘Pachinko Pt.1’ is the perfect example. It is an incredible journey musically and lyrically, that I can’t think of other songs that have absolutely everything you can imagine for a prog song. I think it became “my” song of the year. Its twists and turns take the unaware listener out on a Japanese speed train on the highest rollercoaster. Near 12 minutes (longest track of the album) of tasty progressive madness, the band dared to release as one of the singles. As the main character sings: “My songs are something you never can forget”  – oh yes, you guys did it there, right?

The Pachinko arc continues with ‘Part 2’, ‘King among Kittens’ cleverly connected musically to the following ‘Take me to the City’. Next, ‘The Apathy of Kings’ shows how good Sondre is as a guitarist as well as being a wonderful singer. He already surprised us all with his vocal prowess on our The Progspace Online Festival back in 2021.

A pause arrives with the short an beautiful keyboards instrumental ‘Hanabi’ which works as an intro for their 4th single ‘Okinawa Sky’, which took me back straight to the 80s, the music I grew up with. It is a beautiful catchy synth-pop melodic tune, though lyrically it is one of the deepest emotionally speaking.

With ‘The Sentient Dreamer’ and ‘Giving up the Ghost’ the Pachinko story comes to an end. The first shows the main character reflecting on feelings of being used like a celebrity parody, serving as an intro to the closing track, which works like a farewell, where the character lets go of what he was accepting that the future belongs to someone else, with the surrealism melting into something closer to a eulogy.

“I never thought it would be heaven in a nutshell,
but more than this 
I think your soul will never tire 
All the little hopes and dreams you had acquired 
They took you everywhere”
(Track 14: ‘Giving Up the Ghost’)

These final lines tie Pachinko’s cosmic, technological, absurd journey back to the core of human experience: love, loss, legacy and the unvariable hope that there is more. They work as a healing echo of the shades of pain on the first song of the album:

“I never said it would be heaven in a nutshell
But more than this, I think your soul will start to tire 
All the little hopes and dreams you had acquired they weigh you down 
Now you’re burning in the fire”
(Track 1: ‘Nothing Breaks (A Port of Call)’)

It is a direct connection between the end and the start of this journey, though not as a full circle, but as an upward spiral evolving from grief to hope to acceptance. And still adding a touch of absolute wisdom, with the last lines framed in a grand climax supported by drums originally recorded by Thore before his untimely passing.

“… If you’re far from home
Know your truth
When you’re alone“

Pachinko is not a direct tribute to Thore or an effort to retell their own band’s story. Though the themes they present gravitate toward shock, grief, identity spiralling, the absurdity of tragedy, and the impossible task of rebuilding yourself after that moment where everything that made sense simply doesn’t anymore. Pachinko is better understood as if the band created their own surreal musical language for processing a crushing reality that left them completely out of balance. In faithful Moron Police’s fashion, it is pure randomness and disorientation with a purpose, the attempts to reconnect with life’s meaning through the absurd, and the fragile hope that rises after everything collapses, all brilliantly framed with the most positive and skilfully playful music you can find within the progressive rock and metal trending today.

Pachinko (the album) is a brilliant diamond, right as its crystal counterpart, was shaped from darkness and crushing pressure, albeit of different kinds. The emotional echo of the humanity behind Moron Police’s real history is there without forcing it or overshadowing the surreal fictional story they’re telling.