On 28 August 2020 a power metal album with a death metal growl written into the body of its choruses took number six on Britain's rock and metal chart, and nobody filed the placing as a freak. The band on the sleeve had no eighties behind it. The five-piece from the Canadian west coast whose harsh voice belongs to a man standing in the line with a guitar on him is Unleash the Archers, and Abyss, cut on seven-string guitars for Napalm Records with the band's own Andrew Kingsley producing it, is the most useful single piece of evidence about what the new power metal bands have changed. They have not changed the chorus. They have changed the throat that takes it.
The Finnish epic is blunt about where an instrument comes from. Väinämöinen hauls the great pike out of the water, breaks the jaw out of the dead fish for a frame, sets the teeth into it as pegs, twists a few hairs off the stallion of Hiisi for strings, and plays the forest to a standstill. Then the thing goes over the side on a crossing and the water keeps it. What he builds the second time is a birch that had been standing in a clearing complaining of its life, cut down and hollowed, strung with the hair of a girl who gave it willingly, and the music that comes off the new one empties the woods exactly as the old one did. Nobody in the poem argues that the pike had been the reason.
Power metal spent three decades believing in the pike. The top line of 1987 was made out of one material, a man singing near the ceiling of his range, clean, with no grit on the front of the note and every vowel held long enough for an engineer to multiply it, and within a few years that material had set into a requirement, so that a band without such a voice was a band with a hole in it. How the music arrived at the requirement and carried it through the nineties is where this sits in the story. What the bands of the last ten years have done is dismantle the requirement one component at a time without laying a finger on the thing it was built to protect.
Who holds the line now
The older records used a harsh voice the way a theatre used weather. A slatted drum under a stretched canvas stood in the wings for one scene, cranked hard enough to wear the canvas through along the slats and tear the handle out of a stagehand's fist, then pushed back behind the flats with the plot untouched. Nothing in the writing depended on it. Guest growls on power metal albums worked on the same terms, hired for eight bars of a bridge, printed in small type on the sleeve and sent home.
On Abyss the noise is not standing in the wings. Grant Truesdell holds a guitar in the band and sings the unclean lines, so the harsh voice is in the room for the length of the record and answers the clean one inside the same chorus rather than calling on it. Brittney Slayes meanwhile spends most of a song in her chest register and climbs only where the writing has paid for the climb, which inverts the old arrangement of a tenor at altitude with a hired growl somewhere below him. The album reached 21 in Germany on that writing. Underneath both voices the guitars are melodic death metal writing played on seven strings, which is why the low end of a 2020 power metal record sounds nothing like one from 1998.
Names by the hundred, school by school and country by country, sit in the band roll call. The test for the new power metal bands is narrower than whether a record is any good. What does a band do that the exponents of 1990 could not, and is the difference attested in the first minute? Five or six answer that cleanly. The rest are epigones, and this genre has always carried epigones.
A growl inside the band is a different instrument from a growl on a guest list.
Two registers and one throat
The American band whose singer needs nobody else in the room for the harsh lines is Seven Spires, and across the seventy seven minutes of Gods of Debauchery, out on Frontiers in September 2021, Adrienne Cowan carries a clean line, drops into a guttural one and comes back up inside the same song. The readings of that record and of the one before it put her harsh voice among the black and death metal specialists rather than beside her own cleans. Two singers trading lines is casting. One throat doing both is an inflection, and the same readings hear her bouncing between the two with a volatility they call near jarring, which no pair of singers can be cast to produce.
The eight-piece that cut Emblas Saga on two credited leads instead of a lead and an ornament answers to the name Brothers of Metal, and when Ylva Eriksson's bright line hands a verse across to Joakim Lindbäck Eriksson's rasp the exchange sits in the verse itself rather than waiting for a bridge to excuse it. The chorus comes back as a room of people in unison instead of one voice multiplied into a wall. The old genre built its choir out of a single throat and a tape machine. This one keeps it in the line-up.
Grit on the front of the note
The German school had a rule about how a note is reached. The singer arrives on the pitch, with the slide up to it and the fall away from it both gone, because copies of a chorus only stack cleanly when every one of them starts in the same place. The voice that sings against that rule for a living belongs to Noora Louhimo of Battle Beast. On Unholy Savior she moves between an alto singing voice and a lower unclean rasp from line to line, and the readings that disagree about everything else on the record hear two voices in her, setting her grit beside Doro Pesch's and her clean tone a long way from it.
Produced by Janne Björkroth, out on Nuclear Blast on 17 February 2017 and straight to number one in Finland and 14 in Germany, Bringer of Pain is where the method stops being a flourish, because the gravelly shriek that used to answer Louhimo from inside the line-up is gone from this record and the title track, the fastest thing on it, puts the roughness in her own chorus instead. Reviewers who miss the old foil say so and then grant that she covers the part alone. On any honest reading that is a change in the genre's top line and not a change of singer.
What the new power metal bands took out
Some of the newest bands have left the high clean line unoccupied. Wind Rose put Wintersaga out through Napalm Records on 27 September 2019 with Francesco Cavalieri shouting and declaiming in a deep, gruff voice that never goes after a clean high line, with the hooks built as dense choral chants rather than as a line for one voice, and with the tune itself handed to the keyboards. Nothing sounds missing. With the melody in the keyboards the chant has no tune to carry, which is a different piece of writing from a sustained line pitched above the guitars.
The band from Texas that refuses the continuous double kick and writes power metal melodies anyway is Eternal Champion, whose Ravening Iron came out on No Remorse Records in 2020 with the double kick used sparingly enough that one reviewer reaches for the word trot, with Jason Tarpey working a reverberating mid-range far more than a top register, and with the melody carried by the riff rather than sung over it. Smoulder works the same refusal from Canada, and from epic doom rather than power metal. Pull the continuous kick and the high clean voice out of the specification and the racks stop recognising what is left, even though the chords, the subjects and the shape of the chorus have not moved.
The one part nobody has replaced
Every component of the specification has now been tested except one. Every one of these bands, whatever it does with throats and kick drums, keeps a bright major chorus that resolves where the ear expects it and lifts at the end, and not one of them has tried a record without it. That shape goes back to Hamburg in 1987 and to where it all began, and it has outlived every requirement that grew up around it.
The question is power metal dead gets put to this music every few years, usually by people whose last power metal record came out in 1998. A genre with a dismantled specification and a living chorus is not a corpse. It is a lineage that has stopped checking passports at the door, and thirty seconds of any of these records will settle it.
