who had played on Townsend's previous three solo albums. Townsend wrote and produced the band's first album at the same time he was working on SYL, spending half the week on one and half on the other. The album was engineered and mixed by Townsend and Shaun Thingvold, who has worked on many of Townsend's and Strapping Young Lad's albums. It had the working title Relationships, but was renamed Accelerated Evolution, a nod to the frantic pace of putting a new band together in under a year. Music Accelerated Evolution was written as "the polar opposite" of SYL. The album blended aspects of different genres, including alternative rock, hard rock, and progressive metal, with elements of "heaviness, ambience, humor, and experimentalism". The album has been described as more melodic and more rock-based than SYL or Physicist, yet "more song-oriented" than Terria, with influences by John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and Rush. Songs such as "Storm", "Suicide", and "Sunday Afternoon" were compared to Townsend's Infinity, but were noted as "less frantic and more mature"; Despite this, "Deadhead" derived its name from an extreme industrial metal track with the same title from Godflesh's 1989 album Streetcleaner. Townsend wrote the album to be "commercially viable", making his existing style more concise and accessible but without going so far as to write "pop songs". Townsend utilized clean vocals much more than in his previous albums, and produced and mixed the album in his trademark "wall of sound" style, blending "layers upon layers of guitars, keyboards, and vocals". Release Accelerated Evolution was released in March 2003 on Townsend's independent label, HevyDevy Records. It is distributed in Canada by HevyDevy, in Japan by Sony, and in Europe and North America by InsideOut. The album art was created by Travis Smith, who also did the art for Terria and SYL. InsideOut also released a special edition of the album which contained a 3-track EP called Project EKO, Townsend's first foray into electronica. The album reached number 135 on the French albums chart and number 249 on the Japanese albums chart. Prior to the formation of the Devin Townsend Band, Townsend had represented his solo releases live with the Strapping Young Lad lineup; the band would play one set of Strapping Young Lad songs and one set of Devin Townsend songs. After the release of Accelerated Evolution, Townsend began touring with The Devin Townsend Band, at times separately from