Rising From Uncertainty Voyager Are Back…

Renowned for their signature blend of uplifting yet melancholy progressive pop metal, Australia’s national treasures Voyager have returned after an unplanned hiatus. In a turbulent twist of events following the band’s post-Eurovision success, the upwards trajectory of the band took an unexpected downturn in September 2023, with Danny Estrin being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Having undergone a significant amount of treatment since then, the future of Voyager was always uncertain. The band cancelled all international touring plans, and for a while it was uncertain if Danny would even be able to sing again. The sense of universal devastation felt for Danny and the band was palpable, and the outpouring of love and support from Voyager’s long time and newfound fans provided solace in challenging times. However, 2026 has witnessed the band’s incredible comeback, with the band making an explosive return to the stage in Europe this summer. Voyager debuted their Evening With format in Tilburg and London, with festival sets at Radar and then a quick jaunt to headline Progpower USA. Ahead of their Australian run, the band have revealed a brand new single called Secret. Danny Estrin talks to Rob Lyon about the single and the shows this weekend.

It’s fantastic that Voyager back with new music. You must have that sense of relief and satisfaction, that brand new single out.
Huge, yeah, it’s great, and we’ve been sitting on it for some time, and it’s nice to finally release it to the world. We wanted to do something that was a little bit more upbeat and a bit more fun than the last one. The last one was quite sombre, for various reasons, and yeah, and the response to Secret has been really, really good. People just loving the scents, loving funk, loving the gent underneath and the pop on top, which is classic Voyager. So I’m glad people are enjoying it.

It is fantastic. Was it a deliberate thing to go down more this sort of classic Voyager path, or did it just evolve that way?
It’s interesting, we never actually deliberately set out to do anything musically, we just played with some ideas, although we have been toying with the idea of deliberately doing something crushingly heavy that… because we just want to, so maybe that’s on the horizon. But no, it’s just one of those things that, you’re noodling around on the piano, on the keyboard, whatever, and these kind of things come out, and you go, that’s pretty cool, and these melodies start floating around, and I present these melodies to the band, and then they just groove it up and make it chunky and funky. That’s the tried‑old formula, and it just works.

Chunky and funky. That stands for…
Me and Frankie.

I guess even with your own personal journey over the last twelve, eighteen months, it must make it even more satisfying to come out stronger out the other side?
Yeah, it’s actually quite remarkable if you consider where I was, sort of, 2023. You know, I wasn’t given long. I had massive surgery, the prognosis was really bad, and then, I’ve been doing chemotherapy ever since, and it’s very crazy to think that we are back on form now, and playing shows. Yes, we can’t do the big tours anymore, because I’ve got to get back here for chemotherapy and stuff like that, but the fact that we’re doing long sets, long shows, after I’d completely lost my voice, had lesions all over my vocal cords, and pretty much lost the ability to sing and couldn’t play piano anymore because of the nerve damage in the fingers. So all that sort of stuff… it’s not in the past, but because it’s still very, very active and on my mind every day, but it’s so surreal to be able to do it, I never thought we’d be able to travel again. I remember setting foot in Europe for the first time after diagnosis and stuff, and I just broke down in tears, because I didn’t think I would be able to travel again, let alone play music. So every time you get to do it, every time you play something, every time you release something new, it’s like, this is the post‑diagnosis legacy, and it’s quite remarkable.

I guess it must really feel like a moment of triumph, particularly this new song. It’s bold in a lot of ways, and it’s thumbs up to you.
Thank you very much, yes. Thumbs up to me, I like that, let’s do it. Thumbs up to you also…

Did you ever lose faith, or doubt yourself that the journey might just be too difficult to get back in a way where you can actually play music, let alone tour?
One hundred percent. There was a point, I think in 2024, when the treatment stopped working, and the cancer was spreading all over my body, and I was thinking, this is it. Like, it went to the lungs, it went to the lymph nodes, I was like, this is it. This is it for me. I was starting to write, so that was actually around the time that we wrote this song and we wrote Seen Better Days as well. Seen Better Days was kind of like the crushing moments, and then Secret was like, hey, it’s the resurface from those crushing moments, which you inevitably have. We all have those moments, we all get sad once in a while, you know? But this was really shattering, you’re hugging your family and going, this is not good. So to be able to come out of that and write something that’s light and chunky and funky and fun is great, and to be able to play that as well on this upcoming tour is super great.

Is a song like Secret a bit of an indicator of where the album might head, or will there be twists and turns and maybe some different kinds of funky?
We don’t have an album written, we don’t have any particular things in mind for where the direction will go. So I think there might be some surprises as well. I think because the whole idea of the album is… it is a thing in the metal scene, I guess in the rock scene as well, but, you know, a lot of bands are releasing single after single, and then that itself sort of becomes an album. I’m enjoying that part of the writing process, because it’s almost like, alright, let’s make this one thing, and then see if it all kind of gets glued together as an album in the end. So I think that’s probably what we’re going to try to do. Although, who knows? I mean, we’re taking a little bit of a break after these few shows to write, and it could be that we just get into the studio, and it just all kind of pours out of us, and we just write an album.

What’s definite is that it’s always going to be melodic, melody is always paramount, always has been. The chunky grooves, that’s what the guys do well. I think the formula will stay the same, but I think we will experiment with some different stuff, like we were saying before. You know, we’re all into pretty crushingly heavy music at times, and I don’t think we’ve really done a lot of that recently. I did a guest appearance with Vola on stage, the Danish band, when they came to Perth, and they asked me to do one of their songs, and they’re like, oh, it’s a growl… it’s usually growled by the singer of In Flames. I was like, I don’t really… I’m not really a growler kind of guy and they were like, oh, you can sing it, and I was like, I’m going to commit and do it. When I did it, the whole audience went like, whoa, okay, I’ve never heard that before. I was like, huh, maybe that’s something to explore a bit further going back to my black metal roots.

When you say crushingly heavy, are there any sort of particular bands that inspire that or fuel that direction to go that way?
Yeah, I’m a tragic fan of, like, cheesy metalcore. Lately, I don’t know what it is, but, like, almost embarrassingly so. You know, like, really kind of heavy chunky riffs, and then growled verses, and really over‑the‑top cheesy choruses. I like that. I also love things like Car Bomb, which has become one of my favourite bands. They’re super tech… I don’t know if you know them, but super technical. It’s kind of like Meshuggah without a click track, and a bit more organic, mixed with Deftones. I went to see Lorna Shore the other day, which I thought was really interesting, because it was just a melange of all the stuff that I used to listen to, Emperor, Satyricon, Immortal, all that sort of stuff from the early days. So I do listen to quite a bit of heavy stuff, and we all do, and it’s something that we haven’t really tapped into for a while. When we go out to concerts, we always go to really heavy gigs. It’s like, well, maybe we should write something heavy like that, you know? It’s a point of difference. It might alienate some people, but it may also be a satisfying little foray into something different.

Yeah, Car Bomb were incredible. They played here in Adelaide with Karnivool…
Good, right?

It was an incredible show. Like, three killer bands on that bill…
It was… yeah. I remember hating it, and then I saw it at Euroblast Festival in Cologne that we played a few years ago, and everyone’s loving it. I’m going, this is absolute garbage. Then I got the album, and I listened to it, and I was like, this is absolute genius, you know? Then the second time I saw it, it was just, like, right at the front, big fanboy, because it’s really unique. Ash, the drummer, and I recently went to see an Armenian pianist called Tigran Hamasyan. He had a quartet, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him, but it’s jazz basically. But it was one of the heaviest shows we had ever been to. Like, this guy was slamming the piano, and they were doing linear kind of grooves that were like Car Bomb/Meshuggah straight out of that book. But it was heavier, even though it was just bass, keyboard, drums, and piano. It was like, hey, piano is a percussion instrument, just whacking it, and it was super interesting. So heaviness can come in many different forms, and I like exploring that.

I know you mentioned before about singles. I guess that must keep it also interesting that as soon as the song’s done, you don’t have to wait for an album, you can just put it up on Spotify or whatever platform and get it out there?
Exactly, but it does make the recording process very expensive, because you’ve got to hire a studio, set up the drums every time. If you do an album, at least you can go, alright, we’re going to have three days in the studio, I’m going to do drums and here we’re like, okay, now we’re going to have to pay for twenty four studio days rather than just four. So it has its ups and downs.

This weekend you’ve got two shows, Melbourne and Sydney. Is this just part of doing things in a bit more measured way for a little while, just to dip the feet back into it but not going too crazy?
Yeah, and we have to. I mean, we did a European run earlier this year, then we did a US show, just one show for ProgPower USA a few weeks ago and it does take its toll. Energy levels are a problem, not just with me, but Simone, she gets chronic migraines, it’s really bad. So we have to conserve energy, and we can’t do these… as fiscally responsible as it would be to do a six‑week run of Europe, we just can’t do it. The day in, day out, our bodies just can’t handle it. Plus, I’ve got to be back here every two weeks for chemo. So it’s trying to fit things in between those sessions, which is not always easy. But I have to… I’m very bad at listening to my body, but I sometimes have medical advice to do that, which is very hard.

We’ll happily have you over here in Adelaide. I know the UniBar’s had you a couple of times, and they’ve been great shows…
Oh, the UniBar was one of the best shows we’ve done in a long time. It was so great last time we were there. But yeah, we have to kind of pick what we do, we do a Perth show, and then we go, okay, maybe we can do this one, do that one, and then see how that goes. This is the first time we’re trying two weekend shows in a row and to be honest, Australian touring is extremely taxing, because you’re constantly flying, playing the show, packing up. You’re probably in your hotel back at three or so, then you get up at seven for the next flight. It is actually very taxing, and international bands who come to Australia are always like, how do you guys do this? At least in America you get on a bus, hop on, hop off, same in Europe. You can’t really do that here, and it’s a lot more taxing. The airport just takes it out of you. So we’re just trialling it and seeing how it goes health‑wise, and then if that’s possible, then yeah, more shows in Australia, for sure.

The set list now there are many possibilities, that must be a nice little challenge to have?
No, it’s a terrible challenge, because we’ve got fans from all over, and we’ve got a repertoire of, like, eighty five songs. It’s almost easier when you’re a band starting out, you’ve got two albums, you just play those albums and play the best songs. But now we’ve got so many songs, and luckily people like very different songs. We’re not just like, oh, play Hotel California. There are so many different fans from different albums from different eras who want to hear certain songs, and it’s a real balancing exercise. You want to do something from each album, and you want to do some of the older stuff, but then you do the older stuff and there’s one dude going off in the crowd and loving it, and the rest of the people are going, what is this? You’ve got to gauge the audience response, what they want and what they love. Is it nine hundred people who are like, what? And one person going, yeah, it’s one of these things.

Will it be a break over the summer and then reconvene early in the new year to get the album stitched up?
Yeah, exactly. Start the writing process, and start bouncing ideas back and forth. There are some things in the vault, and so it’s a matter of… I guess our writing process at the moment is, and has been over the last couple of years, I’ll usually come up with an initial idea, I’ll post it in a group, and someone will latch onto it and go, hey, I like this, and put some drums to it or some guitars and stuff. That’s kind of how it goes back and forth. So there is a lot of computer‑assisted stuff, even though we live in the same city and we’re quite close. But it’s actually quite cool, because people get to work on it by themselves, whereas if you’re in a rehearsal room, you go, I’ve got this riff, get the drums going, get the bass in, it’s chaos, you can’t get a word in, everything’s loud, and you get frustrated. So this is a nice way of being able to piece things together, and then you come to the rehearsal room, and you play, and you go, yeah, this works well.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Voyager will perform “Through Storms and Stars” in Australia this November
Sunday, Nov 8: Manning Bar, Sydney
Friday Nov 20: Magnet House, Perth

Tickets are on sale now:
https://ffm.live/throughstormsandstars-au