Channeled Unleashes New Album ‘After’
When everything stopped, Ben Ruegg woke up in a world that didn’t feel the same. His body had shut down, his mind had crossed some invisible threshold, and what came next would change the way he saw everything. After, the new album from Channeled, is that story – not a retelling, but a reawakening.
In 2020, Ben suffered a near-fatal Grand Mal seizure. One moment he was home; the next, he was being revived by
neighbours and paramedics as his wife watched in horror. When consciousness returned, it brought questions too big to ignore – about life, perception, and what lingers beyond the moment we fade out.
“I remember waking up and feeling like everything had shifted,” Ben recalls. “Like someone had rearranged reality.”
From that moment, the songs that became After began to form.
This is Channeled at its boldest – equal parts vulnerability and voltage. Across nine tracks, After carries listeners through waves of tension, catharsis, and discovery. It opens with the slow-blooming After, leading into Beyond The Realm of Being. Reviewer Kevin Rowland once called it “a buzzsaw attack of guitars that channels Ben’s inner Coridian,” and he wasn’t wrong – it’s a track that turns chaos into clarity.
Then comes Maverick, a surge of distortion and defiance. It’s a song Ben’s father never got to hear – an anthem about endurance and resolve, written in the shadow of personal loss. “Even through the hardest times,” Ben says, “that resolve won’t stop. Things like that make me stronger.”
Again reclaims a track first heard on Ben’s solo record This Chaotic Sea, now restored to its original emotive-rock power. Good Love questions existence with both grit and grace, while Interpretation and In The Interest of the Quantum Realm probe the boundaries between faith, science, and sound – the latter preserving the blistering 2021 guitar solo that still cuts through the mix like lightning.
Throughout After, the lyrics draw deeply from Ben’s reading of the Book of Romans during his recovery – months when he was unable to drive and forced into stillness. The reflections on grace, perseverance, and the paradox of strength through suffering thread through every line, forming the spiritual spine of the record.
At the heart of it all stands Perception. It’s not a song you explain – it’s one you experience. Everything After wrestles with leads here: fear, wonder, release. It’s the sound of letting go, of finding peace in not knowing.
The record closes with Way Beyond the Realm of Being, a remix featuring Sly from Chasing Titans, twisting the album’s central motif into something darker and more urgent – the final surge before the calm.
Though After arrives in 2025, its foundation reaches back to the earliest Channeled sessions of 2020–2021. Every vocal and lyric remains untouched from those original takes – the same voice that carried the weight of survival. Around those foundations, Ben rebuilt everything: guitars, drums, atmospheres, and mix.
While producing This Chaotic Sea with Scott Seabright, Ben returned to these sessions and completely re-engineered, mixed, and mastered them himself. The result is heavier, more expansive, and truer to his original vision – a total reconstruction born from clarity and purpose.
The loss of his father in 2023 became the catalyst that propelled both After and This Chaotic Sea forward. His
unwavering belief in Ben’s music still echoes through every note. The record is dedicated to him – a man who believed in the message behind When We’re Gone: that love, once given, doesn’t fade.
If This Chaotic Sea was the light, After is its shadow. The two albums mirror each other – one born from healing and gratitude, the other from the storm before that calm. Together, they tell the story of what it means to almost lose everything and then find the strength to turn survival into art.
