I don't really understand how the music business works, but it seems like the whole album will be recorded and mixed by like September. Do we really need to wait until 2019 to get our hands on the thing?
Recording seems to be on track to finish mid-late August, if we assume all the other four take a week or so each.
Call it another month for mixing (number picked basically from a hat!) and the album will exist in a finished format mid-September. There probably
is an ambitious-but-doable timeline that would have the album out in 2018: Let’s say they’ve finalised the cover art by the time the mix is delivered, they could do a two month promo period and release in mid-November, or a more standard three month with a mid-December release.
I think the issue is that Christmas and the lead-up to Christmas is a bit of a pain for messaging. Every big mainstream franchise is competing for your attention with their mid-November, early-December release dates so you’ll buy their stuff for Christmas - and that’s not just the music industry. If you want to stand out, you need to bring your big boy pants - and in switching from RoadRunner to InsideOut, Dream Theater have just taken their big boy pants off and slipped into something more comfortable.
I’m not slagging off InsideOut by the way, they’re a perfectly cromulent record label and I’d be surprised if they didn’t do a good job of promoting the biggest band on their label! But I doubt they’ll want to go all-in on promoting it while everyone with a franchise is doing the same thing. I imagine we’ll get a reveal and a single this year, but January is a much safer time to be ramping up promo, with maybe an early February release?