Devin Townsend

Photo: P. Schwichtenberg / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

CountryCanada
Formed1997
StatusActive
GenreAvant-garde metal, Progressive metal
LabelHevyDevy Records, InsideOut Music

Devin Townsend is the Canadian singer, guitarist and producer whose work runs from the chaos of Strapping Young Lad to huge, layered progressive metal and ambient records. Active since the early 1990s, he has released more than twenty solo and Devin Townsend Project albums, most recently the rock opera The Moth in 2026.

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Born in New Westminster, British Columbia in 1972, Townsend got his first big break in his early twenties, when he was hired to sing on Steve Vai’s Sex & Religion (1993) and toured with Vai and The Wildhearts. A year later he started Strapping Young Lad, whose City (1997) became a landmark of extreme metal. The band made four studio albums before he ended it in 2007.

Alongside SYL he built a solo catalogue that sounded nothing like it. Ocean Machine: Biomech (1997), Infinity (1998) and Terria (2001) paired his wall-of-sound production with big melodies, and Ziltoid the Omniscient (2007) introduced the world to a coffee-obsessed alien puppet.

After a break to focus on family, he returned in 2009 with the Devin Townsend Project, first planned as four albums in four styles: Ki, Addicted, Deconstruction and Ghost. The name stayed through Epicloud (2012), Z² (2014) and Transcendence (2016) until he retired it in 2018. Under his own name he has since released Empath (2019), Lightwork (2022) and PowerNerd (2024), and on 29 May 2026 Inside Out Music released The Moth, the rock opera he had been working on for years.

Current live band: Devin Townsend (vocals, guitars), Mike Keneally (guitars, keyboards), James Leach (bass), Darby Todd (drums).