Transgalactica
A Kraków father-son duo takes Bach’s French Suite, slips in a fourth beat, and turns an economics argument into one of the most quietly unusual progressive rock singles of 2026.
There aren’t many progressive rock bands whose liner notes cite a Harvard psychologist’s body of work as a foundational influence. Transgalactica — a father-son duo from Kraków, Poland — are one of them. Tomasz Bieroń, a literary translator whose work spans Virginia Woolf, Umberto Eco, and Francis Fukuyama, discovered Steven Pinker’s writing and decided the ideas were too important not to set to music. His son Filip, then twenty years old, agreed. That was 2021. The result is Better Angels, their debut album — and its fifth track, Polonaise for the Middle Class, lands June 26th.
The single is built on a theme from Bach’s French Suite, rerouted through a polyphonic arrangement and an accidental extra beat that turns the traditional three-beat polonaise into something in four — unusual, slightly off-kilter, and completely intentional once you understand how it got there. Symphonic rock filtered through classical composition theory, with something genuinely worth arguing about sitting inside the lyrics. It’s a lot. It works.
The fourth beat slipped in and the polonaise came out quite unusual — namely in a quadruple rather than triple beat. It is a polyphonic piece.
— TransgalacticaThe Song
Polonaise for the Middle Class opens with a structural premise that immediately sets it apart: its main theme is drawn from the “Polonaise” section of Bach’s French Suite, but the band allowed the composition to find its own time signature rather than forcing it into the traditional triple meter. The fourth beat crept in. They kept it. That kind of instinct — to follow the music rather than the template — is what the best progressive rock has always been built on.
Lyrically, the song takes on the claim that globalization has impoverished the middle class, a position Transgalactica views as contradicted by the empirical record — most pointedly by the hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty in Asia over the past several decades. It’s an unusual subject for a rock song, and the band is aware of that. Their own commentary on the track is characteristically dry: they note that since the song was first published, the argument they’re responding to seems to have quieted down, which they take as either a sign of progress or a shift in political priorities. Both, probably.
The official video extends the song’s themes through a period narrative about retailers and the people who oppose them — a visual choice born out of the difficulty of illustrating abstract economic concepts like longitudinal studies. The result is more accessible than the subject matter might suggest, and the band’s self-awareness about their own affection for retail imagery — a recurring motif across the album — is genuinely charming.
Steven Pinker’s books made such a huge impression on Tomasz that he decided to promote the vision of the world contained in them through his musical work — with Professor Pinker’s permission.
— Exposed VocalsWho They Are
Transgalactica is Tomasz and Filip Bieroń. Tomasz is a literary translator of significant range — his work in Polish includes translations of Virginia Woolf, Paul Bowles, Francis Fukuyama, Saul Bellow, Umberto Eco, and Arundhati Roy, among others. That background in ideas and language is not decorative in how the band operates. The lyrics on Better Angels are dense, specific, and designed to be taken seriously as arguments, not just as lyrical texture.
The project was sparked in 2021 when Filip, then twenty, inspired his father to start writing music. The conceptual direction came from Tomasz’s encounter with Steven Pinker’s work — specifically The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now — and the conviction that those ideas deserved a wider audience than academic publishing alone could reach. The album title is drawn directly from Pinker. The band operates with his permission.
The project has recently been reissued with new vocals by Chilean musician Lukky Sparxx, adding another international dimension to what is already an unusually globe-spanning creative collaboration. A second album, Onwards and Upwards, is due in December 2026, with tracks already releasing ahead of it.
Progressive rock built on Bach, Steven Pinker, and a mistaken time signature — Transgalactica are doing something that nobody else is doing, and they’re doing it from Kraków.
— Exposed VocalsWhy It’s Worth Your Time
Independent music at its best does things that the mainstream would never greenlight. A symphonic rock concept album built around the ideas of a Harvard cognitive psychologist, composed by a literary translator and his son in Kraków, with Bach embedded in the time signatures and an argument about global poverty in the verses — that is not a pitch that makes it past the first meeting at a major label. Which is exactly why it exists here instead.
Transgalactica aren’t trying to sound like anything that already exists. The closest reference points are the ambitious end of progressive rock — the tradition that always understood the genre as a space for ideas, not just technical display. Polonaise for the Middle Class sits comfortably in that lineage. It asks something of the listener, and it gives something back in return.
Watch the official video below and follow the band as Onwards and Upwards takes shape through the rest of the year.
Polonaise for the Middle Class by Transgalactica is out June 26, 2026 from the album Better Angels. Watch the official video above. Are you an independent artist with a story to tell? Get featured on Exposed Vocals.
