Two records carrying the same jokes, the same tempos and the same bright keys came out six weeks apart in the spring of 2023, on the same label, from a band that had split in half nearly two years earlier. The four-piece unveiled in 2022 around a singer who had been announced out of the group he had fronted for a decade was Angus McSix, and it held together for one record, Angus McSix and the Sword of Power, which Napalm issued on 21 April, with the man who runs Orden Ogan on guitars, bass and the mixing desk. The band he had left is Gloryhammer, and Return to the Kingdom of Fife came out of the same office on 2 June, with Sozos Michael singing the part.
One pitch held by one throat is not yet anything. Put a chord under it that wants the note a semitone higher and it stands a step short of home, leaning upward, the room finished with it before it has moved. Leave the pitch exactly where it is, the same breath and the same place in the voice, and set a different chord underneath instead, and now the note leans the other way and has to fall, into a key the song will not climb back out of. Nothing inside the note decides which of the two it was. The pitch is a sound. What it turns out to have been is handed to it afterwards, by whatever arrives underneath it.
Records are judged the same way, which is the difficulty with every argument about the best power metal albums 2020s. A finished decade gets one test and it gives no quarter: what later bands stripped off these records and screwed onto their own. Run it on the eighties and the sorting is brutal; run it on the nineties and the answers are already in, all of it feeding the wider story. More than three years of the 2020s have not happened yet. The test is not available, and a list that pretends otherwise is an oracle rather than an argument.
The test a finished decade gets
What that test measures is theft. A record matters in this style when a practitioner who was nowhere near the room has to have the thing it did, the refrain stacked out of one throat off Blind Guardian's Imaginations from the Other Side in 1995, the keyboard sent up to answer the guitar solo for solo on Stratovarius's Visions in 1997, and both of those are closed questions with forty bands standing behind them. Nothing cut since 2020 has had thirty years of other people's hands on it. Two smaller tests can be run now.
The first asks whether the thing has already been done by somebody who did not invent it. The second asks whether a stranger could do it at all. A record can be the finest thing anybody released in its year and fail the second outright, and then it is a monument rather than an instruction, and the trade walks round it.
Two tests the best power metal albums 2020s can already fail
The spring of 2023 ran the first of them by accident. Everything the one band had been known for, the narrated intro, the tenor sat on top of a major chorus, a double kick brought in to flatten the boards under a refrain, went out twice in six weeks, once with the singer and once without him. Both records work.
"Sixcalibur" sits second of twelve on a record of 45:54 that Sebastian Levermann produced, mixed and mastered at his own Greenman Studios, keeping every part of the apparatus and swapping the lyric sheet for fresh absurdities. The guitar chair beside him belonged to Thalia Bellazecca, who had spent 2017 to 2020 in an Italian band of exactly the kind this decade keeps turning out.
"Holy Flaming Hammer of Unholy Cosmic Frost" opens the other one properly after the incoming-transmission intro, 4:35 of it, cut at Parlour Studios in England and mixed in Lübeck, with a new throat in the part and Christopher Bowes still writing every word of the story. The thing came through the split intact in both directions, which settles what it was: the apparatus belonged to the writing and not to the man carrying it, and a device that can change hands is one a stranger can take. Angus McSix did it again on 13 March 2026, another singer in the part, and the other half of the pair has a second since the split announced for 16 October. That repeat is half a record and half a release date, and the 2023 pair had settled the question without needing it.
The apparatus belonged to the writing and not to the man carrying it.
A record nobody can copy
Begun in Hamburg late in 2019, mixed in New York with Charlie Bauerfeind and Dennis Ward producing and out on 18 June 2021, Helloween is the opposite case. The band whose album credits had listed one lead singer at a time is Helloween, and this one carries three. Michael Kiske fixed the European tenor in 1987 and had not sung on a studio album of theirs since 1993, Andi Deris had held the chair since 1994, and Kai Hansen sang the earliest records and had not been one of their singers since 1988. "Fear of the Fallen", out as a single on 21 May 2021, hands the lead back and forth between Deris and Kiske inside the one song.
The track listing reads like a duty rota. Nine of the twelve pieces carry two or three names against them, the lead part cut up and dealt out instead of multiplied out of one man, and the album went to number one in Germany and onto the Billboard 200. None of that makes it an instruction. A chorus divided between three men who have each been the only voice of the same band is not a technique but a biography, and the next band that wanted it would need three careers and a reunion before it could begin.
The bets, and what would settle them
Everything else in the decade is still open, and what can be observed while it runs is a soundcheck. At four in the afternoon the opening number goes through the stacks at full level to a field of empty barriers, nothing in front of the subs but grass, every level exact, the desk walked out to the mast and back, and not one thing proved; then the night puts twenty thousand bodies and a wind on the same field and moves every number on that desk.
Out on Atomic Fire on 8 March 2024, a year and a half after a pair of acoustic albums, Clear Cold Beyond is Sonata Arctica back at the tempo their early records were built on, with "First in Line" sent out ahead of it on 13 October 2023. The bet is not on the tidying of a back catalogue but on supply: a tempo nobody in the trade had asked for is in circulation again. What would settle it is somebody with no stake in those early records writing at that tempo because this one put it back on the table.
Lovebites released Judgement Day in Japan on 22 February 2023 through Victor Entertainment, ten songs, no filler intro, mixed by Mikko Karmila and mastered by Mika Jussila, the same pairs of hands that finished the Finnish records of the late nineties, and it entered the Oricon album chart at five. The bet there is on reach. What would settle it is a European band hiring that record's sound instead of its forebears'.
The Milanese six-piece that has put out four albums inside this decade, stacking ten or more guitar parts at a time until the live arrangement came apart in two pairs of hands and a third player went onto the boards rather than a backing track, is Frozen Crown. The bet is on rate of work, which has decided more of this genre's history than taste has. What would settle it is one of those four records turning up in somebody else's rehearsal room.
The rest stands in a row with nothing proved either way. Blind Guardian took the speed back off the orchestra on The God Machine in September 2022. Powerwolf went to the top of the German chart in 2024 with Wake Up the Wicked by pronouncing the same benediction over the same riff, and Unleash the Archers, Wind Rose and the rest of the intake that arrived before 2020 are cutting their second records inside it. Nothing cut since 2020 has had its hook levered off the record and soldered into somebody else's chorus. None of that is a rule yet. A rule needs a thief.
So the best power metal albums 2020s have settled two things so far. Two records out of one band in 2023 proved that a device can change hands. One record in 2021 proved that another cannot. Everything after those is a position taken early with its odds showing, and the only thing that can settle any of it is the second half of the decade and whose hands turn up on which record. Run on four minutes at a time instead of forty, the same argument gives a harder answer, and that is the best power metal songs.
