In a recent video message their fans, Dream Theater vocalist James LaBrie and guitarist John Petrucci revealed from an undisclosed location that the band have entered the studio once more to begin work on the followup to 2016's "The Atronishing".

Begins James "We've been here for one week, and it's going sensation. Everybody is in the one room, and we're all interacting with one another, and I've gotta tell you, if the first week is any indication of where this album is going, you're in for a treat".

Expected in early 2019 James LaBrie stated that the new material has "a heaviness to it" and added that "there's an aggression to it". John said about the record "I think everyone's on the same page with the type of record this is gonna be. I mean, so far the music is heavy, its progressive, its melodic, its shredding and its also epic." Forming "the five pillars of Dream Theater", James added that "there's such an incredible synergy going on here. This environment that we're in, this particular studio — and no, we're not revealing to you what studio — but it's so conducive to what we're trying to attain."

John goes on to say "And the cool thing is everybody is contributing. We're fired up with all our gear as a band, so it's a real big live sound. We kind of get an idea when we're writing what things really feel like to play and whether the grooves are powerful or whatever, whether it really is hitting us and making the hairs on our arms stand up. And just to give you a little insight on how we're doing this and what we'll be doing for the next couple of months, we have all the gear set up, all of our live gear, and we're basically going through this kind of neat little board here that we have set up. It's a very simple thing, but all the instruments are pretty much direct. We only have four mics on the drums, and as we complete a section or a song even, we get it to where we can all play it — as hard as it is, however many takes we have to get and we get a really solid live demo out of it. And then what we're gonna do is we're also multitracking, so we'll take that multitrack and then we'll mix that down, so we'll have a pretty good-quality demo. And then our engineer will then take that and prep it for tracking, so he'll prep it for Pro Tools, so when it's time to track and overdub, we'll be all set to do that".

So, whilst we have no concrete release date for this record, we can be sure that this release will be a worthy successor to 2016’s The Astonishing. Click the video below for the full statement from the band.