The latest POWERWOLF album dropped at the end of last week, and of course, I jumped on it pretty much immediately. Having listened to it pretty much continuously for the past week or so, I have to say, it is – to use the highly technical term – SUPER AMAZEBALLS AWESOMESAUCE.

It might even be their best album since the classic Preachers of the Night, which dates all the way back to 2013 – I never thought that would be the case, especially after the last couple of albums, which were decidedly average. Don’t get me wrong – Sacrament of Sin and Call of the Wild had a few bangers on them, for sure, but they kind of faded into the less interesting background tracks.

The aforementioned Preachers was perhaps the last album where the band maintained a near-uniform level of quality and brilliance throughout the album, from the very first track to the very last. This one definitely comes very close to that.

The album starts off by kicking your teeth in, with “Bless ‘em With the Blade”, and it doesn’t really let up at all. The title track is even more of a throat-punch, and I suspect it will quickly become a live favourite – it really does hark back to legendary tracks like “Christ and Combat”.

I honestly thought TYR’s new album, Battle Ballads, was going to be the true contender for Metal Album of the Year, but this one is giving it some serious competition. It really is that good – so far, anyway. We shall see whether it is still in my regular rotation in a few months – the new TYR album certainly is, after all.

All things considered, 2024 is turning into a true banner year for heavy metal – we have new albums from TYR, UNLEASH THE ARCHERS, and now POWERWOLF, plus, I believe, new ones from JUDAS PRIEST, and several other legendary bands.

Amazingly, the Wolves have been around since 2003, I think. Which means they are true veterans of the… well, I’m not sure exactly what they are, because they are not power metal, and they are not black metal, even though they dress up in corpse paint. They appear to be their very own subgenre at this point – let’s call it “werewolf metal”.

I hope to see them live one day – my days of serious concert-going are probably long over, as there was a time when I would go to a rock or metal concert practically once a month, but that is much less likely to happen now, given the demands of my work and other things. Still and all, it would be great fun to see these characters live – I suspect they put on one hell of a great live show, judging by what they did with the Monumental Mass a few years ago. (This was their idea of a live event, during the never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed days of the Coof.)

In the meantime, we can sit back and enjoy the sheer balls-out awesomeness of their new work, safe in the hope that they will continue to fly the flag for werewolf-metal for many years to come.