From Afraid of Heights to Crisis of Faith: a gap with music inside it

Afraid of Heights was released in July 2016; Crisis of Faith followed in January 2022. Read only those album dates and the intervening period resembles a blank line. It was not. Music associated with the later record had reached listeners before the complete album, while interviews captured work still under way. Album-release history and the history of the songs need separate timelines, even when both eventually point to the same ten-track release.

A useful snapshot from February 2020

In a ROCK FM interview published in February 2020, Ian D'Sa spoke from a Toronto studio while the band was still completing songs. He said the drums had been recorded at Revolution Recording and the remaining work took place at the band's studio. There was no fixed album date, although he then expected a release that year. This is a contemporary account of work in progress, not a retrospective explanation written after Crisis of Faith arrived.

That last distinction prevents a misleading chronology. The interview's expectation of a 2020 album and the eventual January 2022 release are different kinds of information: one is a plan expressed at the time, the other a completed public event. A history should retain both rather than quietly changing the earlier statement to fit the outcome. It should also resist naming a single cause for the difference unless another source establishes that cause.

Songs existed before the album became an object

The interview already discusses Forgiveness I + II and Reckless Paradise. Both later appear at the beginning of Crisis of Faith, in that order. Their presence in a conversation from early 2020 is enough to rule out the idea that the whole record first became public in 2022. Equally, it does not mean the final album, its packaging and its complete running order were all available at that earlier moment.

For a listener who followed individual releases, the album's opening could therefore combine recognition with new context. Someone arriving only in 2022 would encounter those same tracks as the first two parts of a new record. Neither experience is more authentic, but they explain why two people can describe different portions as the album's discovery. One remembers a sequence of releases; the other meets a finished sequence for the first time.

The band's official Crisis of Faith campaign gives 21 January 2022 as the release date. Keep that date attached to the album, rather than moving earlier song appearances into the same year for a tidier discography. A collection organised only by album year remains convenient, but it compresses a longer public history. The compression is harmless for shelf labels and less helpful when explaining how the release unfolded.

What the interval does not establish

These points do not provide a diary of every month between the two records. They establish a 2016 album, documented studio activity and already-discussed new songs in 2020, followed by the completed 2022 release. They do not prove six uninterrupted years of recording, identify the oldest composition or account for every scheduling decision. Keeping those limits visible produces a more informative account than treating the entire interval either as inactivity or as one continuous session.

The albums themselves can still be compared directly. What changes is the historical frame: Crisis of Faith is not simply a sudden answer arriving six years after Afraid of Heights. At least part of its public life preceded the album date. That makes the intervening years part of the record's introduction, rather than merely the space between two entries in a catalogue.