There are bands that grow old gracefully.
There are bands that refuse to grow old at all.
And then there is Soft Machine, who seem to have slipped sideways out of time sometime around 1970, wandered through fusion, free jazz, psychedelia, Canterbury whimsy, and electric abstraction, and have now resurfaced in 2026 with Thirteen, an album that sounds less like a reunion and more like a transmission from a parallel timeline where the progressive method never died, it just got weirder, wiser, and a little more dangerous.
If the title feels loaded, that’s because it is.
This is the thirteenth Soft Machine album.
It has thirteen tracks. One of them lasts thirteen minutes. The last time the band flirted with numbered titles was Six and Seven in 1973, which, if you add them up, equals thirteen.
Coincidence? Maybe. Soft Machine has always liked numbers the way magicians like mirrors, as portals.
And right from the first notes of Thirteen, you realize this is not nostalgia. This is not heritage rock. This is not the polite museum jazz-fusion that some legacy bands settle into when the fire burns low. This is a band that still plays like the music might explode if they don’t keep moving.
The lineup, John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Thelonious Baker, and Asaf Sirkis, sounds frighteningly alive. Etheridge, who has been orbiting Soft Machine for over fifty years, plays with the kind of lyrical ferocity that reminds you why the late-era band survived at all. Travis, who now carries much of the compositional weight, is the album’s secret engine, switching between saxes, flutes, Mellotron, Rhodes, duduk, loops, electronics, and whatever else happens to be within arm’s reach. Baker’s fretless bass prowls like a jazz animal that learned rock the hard way. And Sirkis, praised years ago by Robert Wyatt as a drummer who could do anything, proves Wyatt right every time he touches the kit, the piano, or the composition credits.
The album opens with “Lemon Poem Song,” a Sirkis piece that eases you in with gentle piano and flowing guitar lines before the rhythm section quietly locks into that unmistakable Soft Machine pulse, loose, elastic, but somehow unbreakable. Etheridge glides through the melody like he’s been playing it since 1974, which, in some metaphysical sense, he probably has.
Then comes “Open Road,” one of the album’s emotional centers, and the first moment where you realize this band can still soar. Organ and Rhodes from guest Pete Whittaker widen the horizon, Travis lifts off on soprano sax, and Etheridge answers with a guitar solo that sounds like two people who have been playing together for decades watching the sun go down and deciding not to say anything about it. The rhythm section pushes underneath, Sirkis throwing thunder into the toms while Baker keeps the ground from disappearing.
Soft Machine has never been afraid of abstraction, and “Seven Hours” dives straight into the deep end, wah-wah Rhodes, tumbling drums, ghost-like electronics, sax lines that sound like Eastern European funeral marches drifting through a broken radio. The piece teeters on the edge of free jazz chaos before finding a theme again, as if the band remembered there’s still gravity in this universe.
Sirkis’s “Waltz for Robert,” written in honor of Robert Wyatt, is one of those moments where the album seems to stop breathing for a second. Travis lets the flute drift over a nearly weightless landscape, Baker answers with one of his most tender fretless lines, and the band plays so delicately it feels less like a performance and more like a memory unfolding in slow motion. There’s something deeply human in it, I can’t help but picture Wyatt back in those long hospital days after the fall, lying there between pain and recovery, with music like this hovering in the room, not trying to fix anything, just keeping him company until the world felt steady again.
Then comes the monster, “The Longest Night.”
Thirteen minutes long, of course. Suite-like, shifting time signatures, Mellotron clouds, organ swells, flute runs, guitar filigree, sudden storms, sudden silences. Travis structures the piece like a journey through several versions of Soft Machine history at once, Canterbury lightness, fusion muscle, avant-garde tension, psychedelic drift, and Etheridge’s solo near the middle burns slowly before climbing into a screaming, ecstatic peak that reminds you this band never forgot how to rock, they just stopped announcing it.
“Disappear” pulls everything inward again, Sirkis at the piano, loops of flute circling like mist, the band playing so quietly you feel like you’re overhearing something private.
“Beledo Balado” feels like a warm, late-night toast raised across continents, a delicious little tribute to Uruguayan guitarist Bele Beledo, with Etheridge stepping forward to deliver one of those solos that says more about friendship than any liner-note dedication ever could. His guitar sings with that loose, grateful joy you only hear when a player isn’t trying to impress anyone, just tipping his hat to someone who’s been part of the journey for a long, long time.
Etheridge’s “Green Books” brings the electricity back, distorted riffs, horn blasts, wah-wah guitar, and the kind of tight, muscular jazz-rock that makes you remember why Soft Machine once terrified rock audiences and confused jazz audiences at the same time.
“Turmoil,” Baker’s lone composition, lives up to its name, fuzzed-out bass, manic solos, sax and guitar colliding like traffic in a dream, the band sounding almost unhinged but never out of control.
And then, at the end, the ghost appears.
“Daevid’s Special Cuppa.”
Built around an old glissando guitar recording from Daevid Allen, the track feels like a message from the original psychedelic universe Soft Machine came from. Duduk, soprano sax, hypnotic rhythms, tribal echoes, it’s short, haunting, and somehow more emotional than anything else on the record. You wish it lasted ten minutes longer, but maybe that would break the spell.
What makes Thirteen remarkable isn’t that Soft Machine still sounds good. It’s that they still sound curious.
This band has been through more incarnations than most progressive acts have albums, yet here they are, not recreating the past, not chasing trends, but pushing forward with the stubborn belief that music should still be an adventure.
In 2026, that might be the most progressive thing of all. Highly recommended!