No Exit  by Fates Warning

The American band Fates Warning from the state of Connecticut, after three albums, released No Exit in 1988 and managed to capture the attention of many fans of the metal community. No Exit is one of the first progressive metal albums ever released. The inspiration for its title comes from a play written by the French author Jean-Paul Sartre in 1944. Its sound moves between thrash metal outbursts and melodic moments accompanied by the synthesizer of Mark Castiglione. The producer of No Exit was the British Max Norman.

Despite the fact that the compositions on the first side of the record are not very long, the musical theme changes that the listener hears are many. Although all the members of the band contributed their ideas to the creation of the record, the main protagonists in the composition of the six tracks that make up the album are guitarist Frank Aresti and the multi-instrumentalist Jim Matheos, who is also solely responsible for the 22-minute composition The Ivory Gate Of Dreams, which covers the second side of the record, a suite divided into eight parts.

No Exit did not make its presence felt beyond the metal community. It reached No. 111 on the Billboard.