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Epica - The Alchemy Project - 11th November 2022 - Album where every song has a guest artist. Delain - Dark Waters - 10th February 2023 - New record with new lineup. Dianne Van Giersbergen - Dianne - New solo album. Edenbridge - Shangri La - 2022 - Currently crowdfunding.
Dec 2, 2022 · Band website: Unlucky Morpheus. 27. Idol Throne – The Sibylline Age. [Cover artwork: Mark Erskine] Indiana’s Idol Throne harkens back to an age where it wasn’t at all rare to find umpteen bands across the globe grabbing two fistfuls of the burgeoning thrash scene and tacking a healthy dose of US power to the formula.
Aug 12. 2022 Power Metal album releases. A list of all music releases for 2022. Find the best music on Album of the Year.
- Rich Hobson
- Sabaton - The War To End All Wars. Could there be any doubt? Swedish power metallers Sabaton have carved a lucrative, ludicrous niche penning odes to military conflict, soldiers and historic events across nine full-lengths; their 10th succeeds 2019’s The Great War, recounting more valour and grief from World War I. Most of these 45 minutes are spent delivering crystal-clear, Maiden-level singalongs and Priest-ready leads.
- Blind Guardian - The God Machine. A perennial benchmark for power metal excellence, The God Machine has clearly been designed to remind the faithful that no one can touch this band when they’re on top form.
- Battle Beast - Circus Of Doom. Circus Of Doom is filled to the brim with epic metal that fires on all cylinders. The eponymous opening track is classic Battle Beast, and then some.
- Hammerfall - Hammer Of Dawn. Having almost single-handedly kickstarted a late-90s European power metal movement that continues to flourish today, Hammerfall should be more frequently and more loudly celebrated than they often are.
- X Japan - Art of Life
- Sirenia - Riddles, Ruins & Revelations
- Haggard - Eppur Si Muove
- The Young Gods - L’Eau Rouge
- Aesma Daeva - The Eros of Frigid Beauty
- Delain - Lucidity
- The Devin Townsend Project - Deconstruction
- Avantasia - The Metal Opera
- Labyrinth - Return to Heaven Denied
- Bal-Sagoth - Starfire Burning Upon The Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule
In the early 90s, X Japan (née X) were at their height of popularity. With fame and fawning came limitless self-indulgence. Band leader Yoshiki purchased a Hollywood recording complex and dug into his Scrooge McDuck-ian vault to hire London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to join him on Art Of Life’s two-year-long recording journey. Rife with everyt...
Pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a symphonic metal band, Sirenia’s 10th studio album Riddles, Ruins & Revelations embraced the darker side of the human psyche, as themes of addiction and declining mental health took centre stage in this sprawling epic. The Norwegians welcomed huge, melodic death metal elements to an already bustling pa...
Asis Nasseri has overseen Haggard’s development from early 90s prog-death hopefuls to an extraordinary chamber orchestral metal collective, employing oboe, clarinet, flute, kettledrum and crumhorn. With an impressive 28 credited musicians, their third album Eppur Si Muove – based around the life of Italian astronomer Galileo – was an undertaking as...
No one has ever made symphonic metal quite like Geneva’s The Young Gods. If their self-titled debut album’s looped samples of classical music and barbed riffs instigated a cataclysmic new dawn for heavy music, the follow-up was stealthier yet no less devastating. From La Fille De La Mort’s invoking of molten new landscapes from the most pastoral of...
A collective masterminded by obsessive leader/boundary-pusher John Prassas, this Minnesota-based ensemble were unique for a number of reasons, their combination of avant-garde metal with gilded chamber music and modern classical being one of them. Aesma Daeva pushed additional buttons with The Eros Of Frigid Beauty’s use of drum programming, and fl...
Former Within Temptation keyboardist Martijn Westerholt intended Delain to be a studio project, but his ambitious vision melded cinematic orchestration and bombastic metal into an extravagant gothic symphony too good to be kept locked away. Appearances from previous bandmate Sharon den Adel and then-Nightwish bassist Marko Hietala helped Delain’s c...
Devin Townsend is no stranger to the kitchen sink approach. Such was the scope of the third album of his eclectic Devin Townsend Project venture, and the sheer volume of ideas crammed in, that the symphonic elements weren’t actually the headline act. But even with the Canadian’s eccentricity and humour doing their best to hog the limelight on Decon...
The brainchild of Tobias Sammet, this debut album from Avantasia featured a raft of top vocalists, including Michael Kiske of Helloweenand Sharon den Adel from Within Temptation, on a concept album based around the witch trials in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries. The album lived up to the title, having a massive, almost Wagnerian approach th...
This Tuscany sextet lean more towards power metal than full-on symphonic metal, but their strength lies in how huge they make the traditional guitar/bass/drums/keys line-up sound. The speed and fluidity of Return To Heaven Denied nudged ahead of early Dragonforce and Sonata Arctica on the timeline, but their incorporation of classical guitars, keyb...
The Yorkshire black metallers suffered from horrendous technical issues on this second album, but it forced them to be inventive, and the result is one of the finest symphonic black metalalbums ever released. Not only was it inevitably brutal, they took inspiration from movie composers such as John Williams, turning towards the wildly imaginative a...
- Chris Chantler
2021 Symphonic Metal album releases. A list of all music releases for 2021. Find the best music on Album of the Year.
Dec 23, 2020 · TOP 15 SYMPHONIC & POWER METAL ALBUMS OF 2020. 15. Iron Savior – Skycrest (AFM Records) One of Hamburg’s premier power metal exports and purveyors of all things Sci-Fi returns with a vengeance a mere one year after a powerful 2019 showing. Despite following close on the heels of their prior opus, there is little doubt that “Skycrest ...
