German prog metal outfit Everon surprised everyone, not least themselves, by returning with Shells, their first new studio album in 16 years in 2025. The band’s driving force, Oliver Philipps told Prog the reasons behind their 16-year absence and long-awaited comeback….
Over the years, bands come and bands go. Some come to an end by imploding spectacularly. Others go out with more of a whimper than a bang. Some just slip quietly away. Everon seemingly fell into this last category, exiting the music scene following the release of North, their seventh studio album, in 2008.
“The process of making North dragged out far too long for a number of reasons,” explains Oliver Philipps from his home near Krefeld, to the northwest of Düsseldorf.
“When I wrote the songs, I liked the album very much. But that was three years or so before it got finished and by then, I didn’t. I believe in momentum – when I’m making an album, I stay in that world for a certain amount of time. When the ideas are fresh, it reflects where your life is at that point. Revisiting it two or three years later can be unpleasant. It was the whole experience and my life situation at the time. How I actually felt about the album was collateral damage.”
Ultimately, he became dislocated from North. He left the mixing to Everon drummer and founder member Christian ‘Moschus’ Moos and isn’t sure he even heard the finished album.
“By then I didn’t care at all,” he says with a sigh. “I was totally behind Flesh and Bridge [the band’s fifth and sixth albums, both released in 2002] when they came out and had a lot of faith. They were incredibly important to me. Emotionally, North is connected to a time in my life I want to move on from. The album really didn’t feel important at all by the time it came out. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad album, though.
“I have curiosity for the music ahead of me. That’s what I find fascinating and drives me: inspiration, the creative process and how it materialises into something. But I can’t maintain enthusiasm for a particular project for two or three years.
Classically-trained multi-instrumentalist Philipps had served as almost the sole songwriter since he joined the band in the late 1980s. His lack of enthusiasm for Everon led to the band grinding to a halt, albeit without any discussion about whether there was a future for the quartet – completed by guitarist Ulli Hoever and bassist Schymy.
“Everon always worked like that,” Philipps explains. “I would have a bunch of new songs and then we would make an album. If I didn’t have songs, we wouldn’t make an album. I didn’t do anything, and nobody asked!”
And that, so Philipps thought, was that. In the intervening 16 years, he busied himself with film music, production and working with artists such as Delain, Phantasma and Imperia.
“I never stopped making music,” he says. “I’ve been writing and making more music than ever. In general, I’m not fond of getting a lot of attention, so I really appreciated working ‘behind the curtain’.”
Last year, however, he came across Everon’s recording contract and realised that the Mascot label still held an option for a further album and jokingly enquired whether they wished to exercise it. “I thought nobody would care and that there was really no point in doing an album,” he recalls.
He was mistaken and soon realised that Mascot did care. In fact, they were absolutely serious about releasing a new album – and so the musician set to work.
“The same thing could have happened five or 10 years ago and I would have had no better or worse reasons to make or not make an Everon album,” he says.
The result of these endeavours is Shells: 11 brand-new songs plus a truly stunning re-working of Flesh’s 14-minute title track, indubitably the magnum opus within the Everon back catalogue. Their unmistakable DNA runs through Shells; it’s supremely melodic – the verses are even catchier than most bands’ choruses – with Philipps’ and Hoever’s guitars taking the band into grittier, more metallic territory on occasion. It’s also frequently grandiose, with Philipps’ brilliant orchestrations a significant feature throughout. In short, Shells is a consummate progressive rock album, qualitatively far exceeding anything the band achieved in the past, and an early contender for record of the year.
Initially Philipps questioned whether he would be able to meet the expectations of existing Everon fans, but he quickly let go of those concerns. “If I think that way, I’m not going to get anywhere,” he explains. “The only thing I can do is what I do with everything: trust my inspiration, do what comes up and feels natural to me, and hope it resonates. I have no intention for it to sound like something I did 10 or 15 years ago.”
Equally, he revels in the freedom that the prog genre affords him. “It’s progressive rock, so you can allow yourself to think in bigger structures. If you work on something where you know it should be three or four minutes in length, there’s things you don’t do. But Everon is like setting my antennae in a different direction.”
Some bands making a comeback might rely on rehashing old ideas or material written during their absence, but not Philipps. He composed the new music and thoughtful, sometimes intensely personal lyrics for Shells from scratch last year.
“I didn’t have a plan or a single note or word for anything at all,” he explains. “But it was super easy and went like a charm. I write most music in my head, not on instruments, and the moment I decided to do the album, the first ideas were coming to mind. I probably could have made 20 songs if needed.”
However, the re-emergence of Everon is marred by tragedy, following the unexpected death of Moschus last May. The drummer, who had recently celebrated his 60th birthday, had already completed more than half the drum tracks needed for Shells, leaving his bandmates with the dilemma of whether to press ahead and complete the album or whether to abandon it once and for all.
“The initial thought was that we should forget the whole thing,” he recalls. “And then for a few weeks there were a lot of practical issues to take care of. Together with Schymy, I took out Moschus’s studio and drum room and dealt with his apartment, motorbike and car. At the reception after the funeral we talked about what to do. By then I had Moschus’s computers – he had been recording on his own and so I knew he had already done eight songs. It was too late to stop there. And also knowing how passionate Moschus was about [Shells], he would have been mad at me, for sure, if I hadn’t finished the album.”
With all the new material written and only the recording of drums for three songs – Until We Meet Again, instrumental OCD and Guilty As Charged – outstanding, Philipps drafted American drummer Jason Gianni to complete the album and re-record drums for Broken Angels. As such, while Shells stands as a stunning release in its own right, it also serves as a tribute to their late drummer and friend.
Philipps seems pleasantly surprised by the level of interest that Everon’s return has generated. Although he deems a further Everon album “relatively likely”, he’s careful to manage any expectations about the band returning to the stage for the first time in around 20 years.
“Because the arrangements are complex, to do justice to how the album sounds would require quite some logistics and involve more hands than we have available. But if the album is an unbelievable success, it’s something we might consider…”
Watch this space…
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