Let's dispense with the elephant in the control room first: this is a record made entirely by human hands, tracked live in drummer Paweł Stępień's own Łódź studio, with the core trio sweating out the arrangements in real time before the overdubs went on. In an age when half the records crossing a critic's desk carry the faint whiff of the machine, there's something almost defiant about a band insisting on the mess and magic of people actually playing together in a room. You can hear it. The record breathes in the way only human timing does — slightly ragged at the edges, alive in a way no quantised grid can fake.

Szewczyk, who composes, arranges, plays guitar and keys, and shares bass duties on the record, has clearly spent the years since the debut sharpening his ear rather than his chops for their own sake. Bassist Marcin Blasiak and Stępień's drums lock into the sort of telepathic pocket that only comes from musicians who, as the band tell it, have known each other for years — this is chemistry, not chemistry-set prog. Into that foundation, the band have folded two international guests: Canadian vocalist and lyricist Kjetil Landsgard, whose words give the record its unexpectedly plaintive centre, and Australian saxophonist Hugo Lee, whose horn threads through the arrangements like smoke finding the gaps in a doorframe.

The album's conceit — a song cycle tracing existence from its first breath to its last — could easily have curdled into concept-album pomposity. It doesn't, largely because RSM never mistake ambition for solemnity. "Are We All in Abuse" is the record's beating, off-kilter heart: odd-metered, urgent, and possessed of a lyric that snags rather than soothes. "Chasing the Truth" is the instrumental showpiece, all interlocking motifs and sax lines that dart and circle like something out of the Canterbury scene reimagined with a metal band's muscle. And closer "Life" does exactly what a closer should: it exhales. Reflective, unhurried, it lets the album's themes settle like sediment rather than hammering them home.

Producer and mixer Grzegorz Mukanowski deserves real credit here — the sound is warm without being soft, tough without being brittle, exactly the "natural yet tough" balance Szewczyk says he was chasing. Nothing about *Life is…* sounds like it's trying to impress you with its own difficulty. It's proof that prog-fusion's oldest promise — virtuosity in service of feeling, not the other way round — is alive and well in a studio in Łódź. Give it the full runtime, uninterrupted. It rewards that kind of attention, and precious little does these days.