By the end of the 1980s the case against Judas Priest had been argued in full, and it had nothing to do with any courtroom. The band that bolted leather and studs onto the whole idea of heavy metal had spent 1986 flying Turbo, with guitar synthesizers slung under both wings and a sound trimmed for American arenas, and Ram It Down in 1988 tried to climb back to cruising altitude without ever clearing the cloud. The question hanging over the Metal Gods was blunt. Were they now a heritage carrier, flying the old routes on a reduced timetable for the faithful?
Recorded at Miraval Studios in the south of France in the first months of 1990, mixed at Wisseloord in Hilversum, produced by Chris Tsangarides alongside the band and released by Columbia in September 1990, the twelfth studio album by the Birmingham five answered the question by tearing the old flight plan into strips and throwing it out of the cockpit window. That same summer, on 24 August 1990, a judge in Reno dismissed the lawsuit that had tried to hold Stained Class responsible for the deaths of two young men. The band had spent those months in court. Painkiller is the sound of them leaving it.
The decisive change sat behind the kit. Dave Holland was gone, and in his seat sat Scott Travis, recruited from Racer X and the first American ever to wear the band's colours, a drummer with two bass drums and the reflexes of a test pilot. K.K. Downing put the effect plainly when he looked back on it with The Jeremy White Show in September 2023: "it just opened doors for myself and Glenn to write rhythmically and musically." Those doors opened onto a runway.
Wheels up
"Painkiller" opens with the drummer alone, a roll around the kit with nothing underneath it, and it behaves exactly like the first seconds of a takeoff run: brakes released, the airframe shuddering, the runway lights beginning to smear into a single white line. Then the twin guitars of Glenn Tipton and Downing light the afterburners, and Rob Halford climbs into a register most singers never visit, holding it through a chorus built to outlast everyone who recorded it. The title track is the record's mission statement and its hardest proof. Beyond dispute, it is the heaviest thing the band had put its name to in sixteen years of records.
The genuine surprise is that the aircraft never levels off. "Hell Patrol", "All Guns Blazing", "Leather Rebel" and "Metal Meltdown" come in low and fast, one sortie after another, each one strafing the same square mile the last one flattened, the riffs cut short and sharp and Travis driving the double kick underneath them like a turbine that has no idle setting. It is an onslaught with the discipline of a formation. Nothing drifts out of line.
"Night Crawler" is where the record finally throttles back, and it does so to hunt rather than to rest. It is a creature feature flown at night with the navigation lights off, slower and heavier on menace than on velocity, the first song on the record to trade the sound barrier for a shape moving somewhere underneath it. It is also, fairly, the song where the lyric sheet starts to read like a late film on a small channel. More on that below.
"Between the Hammer & the Anvil" does the less glamorous job, and it matters as much. Sitting seventh, deep into the flight where a lesser record would be circling for a place to land, it proves that the second side carries the same payload as the first. The guitars keep their edge, the drums keep their speed, and the fuel gauge never once flickers.
One change of altitude
"A Touch of Evil" is the only deliberate change of pace on the album, and it is the song that makes the rest of it sound faster. Don Airey's keyboards spread a dark ceiling over a slower, brooding song, and for five minutes and forty five seconds the jet cruises at night above the weather, engines steady, instruments glowing, the ground somewhere far below in the dark. Then "Battle Hymn", fifty seven seconds of instrumental taxiing, lines the aircraft up for "One Shot at Glory", the longest song here at six minutes and forty nine seconds and a closer that goes out the way the opener came in: flat out, with nothing held back for the return leg.
A heritage carrier on the old routes does not break the sound barrier over its own airfield.
The flaw in the flight plan
The limit is written on the lyric sheet, and nowhere else. Beasts, evil, leather and weapons are the whole vocabulary, and the songs are populated by avengers and monsters who would be at home on the sleeve, a winged rider on a machine with saw blades for wheels, and nowhere near a thought an adult would carry out of the room. "Night Crawler" is the clearest case and the title track runs it close. That is a real cost, not a footnote: nobody boards this flight for the in-flight reading, but the words are the one part of Painkiller that never leaves the ground, and they are why it stands as a monument to velocity rather than to anything it has to say. It keeps the record just below the handful that define metal outright.
It was also the last studio album the classic front man made with the band for fifteen years; Halford was gone after the tour and did not return until Angel of Retribution in 2005. Even he cannot fly it now. He told Dean Delray's Let There Be Talk podcast in November 2020: "I wish I could sing 'Painkiller' like I did in '91, but I can't." Nobody else can either, which is the point. Every speed and power metal band since has opened this black box to see how it was done, and a band that was being written off as a heritage act made it at forty thousand feet. Anyone who files Priest under the leather and the nostalgia has not heard the engines on this one, and the price of ignoring it is simple: every fast heavy metal record made after 1990 will make only half as much sense.