Artist releasing album since 2000: Dream Theater

Dream Theater are a progressive metal band founded in 1985, by core members John Petrucci, John Myung and Mike Portnoy. The members met whilst studying at the prestigious Berklee music college and were bound by a love of old progressive music but also a love of heavy rock and some of the early thrash metal which began to become popular in the 80's. Bands such as Rush, Metallica, King Crimson, etc influenced their style of playing.

The band found that their studies at the college were becoming more and more sidelined in comparison with playing and rehearsing and dropped out so that they could focus their energies on the band. Under the name Majesty, having recruited high school friend Kevin Moore and Chris Colins on keyboards and vocals respectively, they set about working on a demo. The first line up of Dream Theater would be short lived with Colins leaving shortly after the demos were recorded.

The band recruited new vocalist Charlie Dominici and went on to record "When Dream And Day Unite" in 1989 under the new guise of Dream Theater. However due to problems with the bands label not financially supporting a tour of the debut album, the band were restricted to their hometown of New York and only played five live shows in support of the album. Shortly after this handful of local gigs Dominci was fired. The Band began auditioning new vocalists in 1991, when the demo tape of Canadian "Winter Rose" front man James LaBrie struck the remaining of the members; he was given the role having passed an audition held in New York.
Since the Hiring of LaBrie in 1991 the band have released numerous albums, perhaps the most acclaimed being the bands first with the new vocalist. "Images And Words" (released on ATCO records in 1992) was a major success for the band scoring them a Gold record in the United States. The first single pulled from the album "Pull Me Under" achieved some commercial success in the United States.

It would be later on in the bands career of writing which proved some of their most exceptional, namely the album "Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes From A Memory" an album inspired by a song featuring on "Images And Words". The concept album is divided into "acts" which each tell another part of the story, the songs deal with the emotions of love and guilt and also acts of infidelity and murder all seen through the eyes of a man call Nicholas. A version of the album performed live in full at a New York date of the world tour was released by the band on DVD titled "Metropolis 2000".

The band's latest album "Systematic Chaos" was released in the UK 4th June 2007, the album draws on a range of styles, ranging from very heavy thrash metal styles to a songs in the style of pop, the songs deal with content ranging from political anti war messages ("Prophets of War") fictional creatures ("Forsaken") and a song continuing drummer Mike Portnoy's Alcoholic's Anonymous writing work ("Repentance"), a series of songs based around the 12 step programme the drummer used to recover from his alcohol addiction. The album reached number 25 in the UK album charts.