Musicians are a funny bunch, putting several well-known artists together is no guarantee of success. Get the mixture right and things will bubble and fizz nicely, get the fusion wrong and you will have a nasty mess on your hands. Thankfully Swedish melodic death metal maestros Arch Enemy fall very much into the first camp, as a stacked discography attests. Their individual achievements are too storied to detail here, but it’s enough to say there’s more talent here than at your average Grand National derby and they bring their collective pedigree to the fore on their twelveth long player Blood Dynasty, an explosive affair that stands amongst the genres best.
The first thing that really hits you with opening track ‘Dream Stealer’ is Alissa White-Gluz’s vocals. The death metal genre is a graveyard for singers who haven’t taken care of their pipes and have blown their cords through improper care and over exuberance, yet Alissa immediately struts her stuff and unleashes some death-like growls that are seemingly dredged from the depths of Hades. Yet that is only one facet of her oeuvre and she handles the higher register equally well for some truly crystalline, glass-shattering shrieks. It gives the band an exorbitant amount of freedom; it is akin to having another instrument in the group and adds texture to an already rich tapestry. There’s something so very cinematic about the eleven cuts that comprise Blood Dynasty, ‘March Of The Miscreants’ is a perfect example of the “Theatre of the mind” and will implant strong images on your consciousness. The band make the characters who inhabit these songs three dimensional and they’ll stomp around your cranium long after the disc has stopped spinning.
Playing any kind of crossover is a risky business, fumble the ball and a band can find themselves in a musical no man’s land with no appreciable audience to play to. However, Blood Dynasty straddles several genres and walks a fine line between the beautiful and the brutal. This is an album that’ll find favour with anybody who likes heavy music, ‘Paper Tiger’ is powered forth by that type of gallop you wish Maiden would still write whilst majestic closer ‘Liars & Thieves’ races towards a frantic finale and is chock full of bombastic drums, raucous riffs and, of course, a few surprises in the vocal department.
Blood Dynasty is the sound of a band at the top of their game and ensures that their future is assured.
- Blood Dynasty is released via Century Media Records on 28th March 2025.
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Track List:
- Dream Stealer
- Illuminate The Path
- March Of The Miscreants
- A Million Suns
- Don’t Look Down
- Presage
- Blood Dynasty
- Paper Tiger
- Vivre Libre
- The Pendulum
- Liars & Thieves
