Metal

Metal Blade Records · 9 October 2026

“Obsession” runs one minute fifteen and isn’t a song: it’s the on-ramp. Once it’s done, “Ghost Emperor” (three twenty-seven) arrives with the scream up front and a riff pitched between fist-in-the-air heavy metal and the speed metal of the early eighties, and the record stays at that pitch for a good while. Eleven tracks, forty-two minutes and eleven seconds, which for a band of this school is the right length. Out 9 October on Metal Blade, seven years after “The Throne Within” (2019).

Track six is what keeps the album from being one idea played eleven times. “Leaving”, five twenty-five, is the longest piece in the first half and the slowest of the lot, and it sits exactly where the record was starting to need air. After it, the title track (four eleven) and “Night Blade” (three fifty-four, the 4 September single) work at mid-tempo with a hammering stride that recalls Judas Priest circa 1982, and “Abattoir” (three forty-nine, the single from the 23rd) goes back to the opening speed. “The Final Hour”, five thirteen, closes with the darkest and longest thing here.

This record never hesitates. RAM changed subject — “The Throne Within” was about spirituality and this one is about people pushed past what they can carry, and about deciding not to comply — and changed nothing at all about how they say it. “1984”, four forty-one, is the clearest case: a good track, with the anthem shape it’s reaching for, and also one more in the long line of metal songs that take Orwell as a lyric and add nothing that wasn’t already there in 1984. On a record this short on doubt, that lack of textual ambition shows.

The band is from Gothenburg and this is their seventh album in a career now past twenty years, and what they’ve done here is what they know how to do, executed without a slip. Seven years of silence have brought nothing RAM hadn’t tried before. They play Barcelona on 6 December.

Rating: 7.5/10

Text by Roger Estivill