Jimmy Pallagrosi teams up with Hayley Griffiths and Joe Payne for ZIO

Former Karnataka drummer Jimmy Pallagrosi has unveiled his new outfit ZIO, which will feature his former band mate Hayley Griffiths and Joe Payne on vocals.

The new band, which also features Franck Carducci keyboad player Olivier Castan, guitarist Marc Fascia and New Device bassist Liz Hayes made their live debut last night at France's Crescendo Festival. The band are already working on their debut album, and hope to have a single released before the end of the year.

"After the split of Karnataka, all I wanted to do was go back on tour but I needed a good reason to do so," Pallagrosi tells Prog. "I felt my fans deserved something resulting from hard work and blood, sweat and tears, so for 8 months I worked tirelessly on the ZIO debut album. In order to do this, I asked Olivier and Marc to be involved in the writing. We also have Liz Hayes on bass who is going to bring the high energy rock and roll performance to the prog genre!

"The new record is a concept album involving story telling and fantasy which has been inspired by the video games I grew up playing, and each of the characters in the story will be played by different guests. We’re are super excited to announced that Joe and Hayley will voice the main characters. We will also have more guest artists to come that will be announced later this year."

You can find out more via the band's Facebook and Instagram pages.

Artists

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.