Stryper release Throne of Thorns tomorrow, 25 September, through Frontiers Records.
Eleven songs and not one of them reaches four and a half minutes. The longest is Ashes to Roses at 4:02, the shortest Along Again at 3:25, and eight of the eleven sit between 3:25 and 3:56. Frontiers has the title track out as a music video and I'm Alright (I'm Okay) as a lyric video.
It is the seventeenth full length listed under the name, in a run that starts with The Yellow and Black Attack in 1984 and takes in To Hell with the Devil from 1986, Against the Law from 1990 and, last year, The Greatest Gift of All.
The line up is the one that came back in 2003, when the band restarted eleven years after splitting: Michael Sweet on vocals and guitar, Oz Fox on guitar, Robert Sweet on drums, with Perry Richardson on bass since 2017. Stryper started in Orange County in 1983 and are the band anyone writing about Christian heavy metal has to open with.