Iron Savior – Firestar | soundsfromthedarkside

Iron Savior is back with their twelfth album, and we checked out if they can still deliver the goods.

It’s been almost two weeks now since Firestar, Iron Savior’s twelfth full-length album dropped. In that week, I’ve been trying my hardest to get into Primordial’s new opus and doing my best to make sense of Roger Waters’ new Dark Side of the Moon Redux, provided there is any sense to me made there at all. These endeavors have ultimately failed because I keep coming back to Firestar, which might just be the most fun, infectious slab of power metal released in 2023.

Kicking off with an instrumental intro, The Titan, the German masters of science fiction power metal start firing on all cylinders with Curse of the Machinery, which is as good an opener you can start a collection of songs like this with. It’s a fast track, immediately showing that whilst Iron Savior’s core sound hasn’t changed one bit, it has been refined somewhat. The band’s brand of metal is still an amalgamation of classic Judas Priest and an assortment of Teutonic metal legends such as Accept and Helloween, but with more of a bite to it. The riffing is on point, the songwriting is tight, and Piet Sielck has a gruffness to his voice that makes sure the material never ventures into cheesy territory.

The first half of Firestar is ludicrously good, with one great cut following another. In the Realm of Heavy Metal is as cliché an ode to all things metal as they come, but it still makes you want to raise your fists in the air and shout along. Demise of the Tyrant’s four minutes of midtempo goodness is rapidly turning into one of my favourite Savior songs, followed by the blisteringly fast title track. The choruses of these songs will lodge themselves into your brain after having heard them one or two times and before long you will find yourself humming bits of Demise of the Tyrant or having the chorus of Through the Fires of Hell running through your head.

Iron Savior 2023

The second half of Firestar is also strong but lacks the absolute punch that the first five songs pack. That is not to say that there are any bad songs here, but Iron Savior definitely put their best stuff up front here. Firestar, whilst sporting a moderately lean running time of fifty-three minutes, would have been an even better album if Across the Wastelands had been left on the cutting room floor. Suffering from a lacklustre chorus and lacking the overall quality of the rest of the material, it’s the only song on Firestar that refuses to gel, and it’s the only one I’ve started to skip on subsequent playthroughs.

That being said, every self-respecting fan of decent power and/or heavy metal owes it to themselves to give Firestar a chance. Twenty-six years and twelve albums in, Iron Savior is still able to impress, one-upping the already great Skycrest from 2020 and deliver one not only one of the best metal albums of the year, but also one of the most fun. Mandatory stuff.

Label: AFM Records

Buy it here: https://shop.afm-records.de/search?sSearch=iron+savior

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