Metal
earMUSIC · 18 September 2026
Eight minutes and four seconds, at track five. “Born with a Hammer” is the longest thing Kai Hansen has put his name to alone, and earMUSIC presents it as the heart of the record and compares it to “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The piece changes direction several times and always comes back to the same motif, which is the opposite of what “Bohemian Rhapsody” does. Of the other nine tracks, none gets past five and a half minutes.
The band that recorded it is not his usual one. Eike Freese plays guitar and co-produces with Hansen and with Alexander Dietz, who is Heaven Shall Burn’s bassist; Dan Wilding of Carcass is on drums and the second guitar is Tim Hansen’s, of Induction. These are death metal and metalcore names put at the service of a melodic heavy metal record. The advance tracks, meanwhile, came out in this order: “Feeding the Beast”, “Welcome to Life” and “Wait and See”, which on the album are tracks one, two and four, so three of the first four were already known before 18 September and what was left to discover in the first half was precisely the eight-minute piece.
The five tracks of the second half (“I.D.G.A.F”, “End of the Road”, “Triple Trouble”, “Invaders” and “Wonderland”) add up to twenty minutes and none reaches six. Everything wide about this record happens before minute thirty. And across ten songs there is a duplication that is hard to justify, since track three is called “Don’t Care” and track six “I.D.G.A.F”, which is the same idea in English initials.
Ten tracks and forty-six minutes. It is Hansen’s second studio album under his own name after XXX – Three Decades in Metal (2016); in between came the live album Thank You Wacken (2017) and XTrax: The Demos (2024). A co-founder of Helloween and the founder of Gamma Ray, he returns to his own name after the years of the Helloween reunion.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill