A View From The Top Of The World

A View from the Top of the World is the fifteenth studio album by American progressive metal band Dream Theater, released on October 22, 2021. It is their first album to be recorded at their own studio, DTHQ (Dream Theater Headquarters) as well as their first since Black Clouds & Silver Linings (2009) to include fewer than nine tracks, the first since Dream Theater (2013) both to contain a track of at least ten minutes in length and to end with the longest track. It is also Dream Theater's last album to feature drummer Mike Mangini, who left the band in October 2023 upon the return of original drummer Mike Portnoy. The first song in the album, "The Alien", won a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 2022. The band began work on A View from the Top of the World about a year after the release of their then-latest album, Distance over Time (2019). Metal Addicts reported in April 2020 that Dream Theater (who had recently rescheduled and eventually cancelled their touring plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic) was planning to work on a new album in 2021. On the direction of the album, guitarist John Petrucci stated in an August 2020 interview with Ultimate Guitar: "The eight-string project with Ernie Ball Music Man is something we are working on and hoping to have developed as this year goes on. I'm hoping that on the next Dream Theater record I'll be able to explore that." Petrucci later confirmed, during an October 2020 interview with Revolver that, within the next few weeks, the band would be heading into DTHQ (the band's newly constructed studio) to get started on a new album.