What is the right amount of cheese? I don’t mean when you go to the fanciest Italian restaurant in the world (The Olive Garden, where you’re family) and decide how high you want the mountain of parmesan to get, or which actual cheese is best – though Manchego is the final answer. What I mean is when you are making power metal – a genre about as renown for cheese as a charcuterie board – what depth of flavor and how thickly do you lay it on? You can take the Nanowar of Steel approach and turn Kraft singles into a delicacy or offer up a more refined, light dusting like Unleash The Archers. The battle-tested Warkings find a way to blow my cheese scale to smithereens, but with a level of sincerity and class that has left me befuddled. Armageddon finds the group – built from the souls of famous warriors – as empowered as a college kid with a 300 poster screaming, “THIS IS SPARTA!” However, as much as I detect a whiff of Velveeta amidst the record’s most bombastic moments, I can’t help but appreciate the craft, the sheer joy the band have put into the record. Power metal fans are unlikely to find a more palate pleasing release in recent history.
Bassist The Viking shares how the group came to this point:
“We died… gloriously on the battlefield! Or… not so gloriously. Honestly, dying hurts and smells weird. But we tell everyone it was glorious — axe in hand, enemy in sight, beard blowing in the wind! And so, we met at the gates of Valhalla. Or Paradise. Depends on which gods you still bother praying to. Either way — we met there. First thing we did? Fought. About who was the mightier warrior and the greater king. Then we realized: we’re already dead. So… maybe let’s not waste eternity bickering. Turns out, we had something greater in common — endless tales of glory, betrayal, conquests and questionable drinking decisions. And what better soundtrack to these war stories than… POWER METAL.”
“We wanted this album to feel like the soundtrack to the most glorious, over-the-top battle movie ever forged,” they add, “one where you ride a dragon into battle while explosions go off in the background for no tactical reason whatsoever. So, we did something we’ve never done before in the history of the afterlife: We invited outsiders into our sacred circle. Musicians. Friends. Brave souls we met on our long journey through the realm of the living. We asked them to write songs with us. And to our surprise… it really worked. No one had ever entered the war tent before. But the songs turned out epic. The spirit was strong. And no one even died. Well… maybe someone twisted an ankle. But that’s just part of the process.”
Armageddon is out on Friday and you can pre-order it from Napalm Records. Follow Warkings on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for future updates.
Picture by Matthias Schwaighofer/Schwaighofer Art
