Rats in the Temple is a very good thrash record with a great one locked inside it, and what keeps the great one locked in is load, not horsepower. The engine is fine. The trailer is packed too high.
The old firm with sixteen studio albums on the odometer, Flotsam and Jetsam, has spent the years since 2019 doing the one thing bands of their vintage rarely attempt, which is getting better where everybody can hear it. Released through Napalm Records on 28 August 2026 as their first album for the label, just under two years after I Am the Weapon came out on AFM and reached twenty four in Germany, the record keeps the same five-piece intact, with Eric "A.K." Knutson singing, Michael Gilbert and Steve Conley on guitars, Bill Bodily on bass and Ken Mary on drums and in the producer's chair beside the band. No outside producer. Jacob Hansen mixed and mastered it, and that is the only specialist the workshop called in.
My habit with new albums from the eighties thrash class is to assume a nostalgia act until the songs prove otherwise. "Harvesting the Hate" settles the matter at once: it rips the garage door off its runners at full velocity, fast and vicious and melodic in the same breath, with a hook big enough to tow with. The production is heavier and brighter than anything in the band's recent run, and the result sounds like an eighties diesel with rust still on the block, torn down to the last gasket in the owners' own shop and bolted back together so tight that it turns over on the first key and pulls a full load up the grade without a cough.
Some ears raised on muddier retro thrash will find all this brightness almost surgical. Let them. Clarity costs this record nothing, and the guitars bite harder for it.
The gearbox and the showpiece
Gilbert and Conley are the gearbox, two guitars meshing like cut teeth at a speed where one chipped tooth would strip the whole housing, and the teeth hold: fast, precise, harmonised riffing all the way through, with the sweeping harmonies on "Absolution" among the best on the record. Under them, Mary's double bass drumming and Bodily's bass run with real militarised precision. Speed means nothing if the drummer does not know where he is going, and Mary always does. That sentence belongs on the wall of every rehearsal room in the genre.
The title track is the showpiece, and Knutson has called it possibly the most technically challenging song the band has ever recorded. It opens on an orchestrated, cinematic intro and then drops the clutch into breakneck thrash with progressive turns in it, the kind of song built to hand a drummer his moment, and Mary takes it. It is dark, technical and ugly in the best possible way. Hard to improve on that.
"A Taste for War" is where the driver drops a gear: a slower, mechanised, almost marching tempo carries one of Knutson's most convincing vocal performances, an anti-war statement that needs the room a slower song gives it to land. "Anthem for the Broken" swings the other way, toward power metal, closer to Brainstorm and Primal Fear than to any thrash forebear, and it lands as close to an instant classic as the record gets.
That voice is the part of the machine with the most miles on it. It cannot summon the old high notes anymore, deeper and rougher than it once was, yet the performance still carries every chorus it is handed. The wear is an asset. A rasp with road on it suits songs about war, betrayal, abuse and mortality better than the old sirens would have.
One pallet too many
The fault is weight. Cut "Damnation" or "The Edge of Nowhere" and the album tightens considerably; "The Ghost Behind My Door" and "First on the Spike" take a while to earn their keep too. Those last three sit back to back in the middle of the record, and there the whole chassis sags like a leaf spring under one pallet too many, still rolling, still in gear, losing a little speed on every rise. Nothing here is bad. Some of it is ballast.
Nothing under the bonnet is worn out. The trouble is the extra crates stacked on the trailer.
Whether this is the best album since The End of Chaos opened the run in 2019 is where the record splits a room: a fourth strong one in a row with nothing weak in the stretch behind it, though the case for Blood in the Water staying just ahead of it is not hard to make either. Put me on the side of Rats in the Temple. Trim the slack it is carrying and it wins that argument outright.
This is a road-hardened band with the best-sounding engine it has had in years, and a record for anyone who filed these five under eighties memories and stopped checking. Ignore it and you go on believing thrash veterans exist only to play their old records back. They are building new machinery. Apart from a couple of crates that should have stayed in the yard, it runs.