Fifth Daughter - Stellar Season (2025)

Ahead of its folky stratosphere with its key ingredients between progressive and psychedelic music, Fifth Daughter’s debut album Stellar Season is a meditated guidance that puts you in a trance. Fifth Daughter is a duo which consists of Nicholas Whittaker from Diagonal and James Howarth, a former member of Running Dogs, Stellar Season started out as a loose conceptual album during the pandemic when the world was in lockdown five years ago. The story takes place on a rural society far beyond Earth’s stratosphere where its possession with summer, leading to its endless day, they will soon regret, and learning how to appreciate the rhythm of the seasons.

The album takes you on a voyage beyond what any other progressive-rock album has endured. Featuring its raga-rock sounds which speak of fellow Ladbroke Grove maestros Quintessence, Jade Warrior, Incredible String Band, Comus, and Trees, this is an album that puts you into a growing conscious and make you feel that you need to move away from the stress that put you under and come into a land of a mystical forest, waiting for you.

This is a duo that really take admiration of the source material they’ve endured, making sure they understand what they were going to do, and the direction they were going to take. You can imagine them reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi for admiration in their own search to find their true self. The first four tracks are quite the rarity for meditated classes as the second half of the album, they can prove to themselves they can rock it out.

Not only Fifth Daughter are duo, but it features Diagonal band members Luke Foster and Dave Wileman and ambient guitarist Will Howes in the picture. It’s almost a Diagonal album in disguise, but without the heavy rock orientation.

There’s the tenderness, the exotic percussion sounds, sitars, and synths flown into the galaxy. It may be a repeatable album top to bottom, but it’s very much a beautiful painting, coming to life in all of its true, dynamic from.