Stormhunter is a heavy metal band from Germany formed in 1998, releasing to date two E.P.’s – ‘Ready For Boarding’ (2020) and ‘Strangle With Care’ (2022), and four full-length albums – ‘Stormhunter’ (2009), ‘Crime And Punishment’ (2011), ‘An Eye For An I’ (2014), and ‘Best Before: Death’, released in 2024…
…featuring eleven songs over a blistering forty-eight minutes! The five-piece outfit – comprising guitarist (and band founder) Stefan Muller, vocalist Frank Urschler (Bitterness), drummer Andreas Kiechle (Bitterness, Unlight), guitarist Burkhard Ulrich, and bassist Florian Bernhard (Nuclear Warfare) – hail from the town of Balingen in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, and are in scintillating form! ‘Morituri Te Salutant’ is a heavy-hitting, one-and-a-half-minute instrumental intro with incredible oomph and gusto, building the anticipation of listeners everywhere – the album exploding furiously into life with the rampant ‘Reaper’. Travelling at over a hundred miles an hour ‘Reaper’ is frantic, the band pressing the pedal firmly to the metal, roaring down the autobahn faster than the speed of fucking light!
What a sensational start to ‘Best Before: Death’ – Stormhunter whetting the appetites of everyone for what’s to come! And what’s to come is nine more simply breathtaking songs – the first of which ‘Altar Of Illusions’, opens with a tension-fueled fifty-second build up creating one hell of an atmosphere! And then boom, bang, whoosh – ‘Altar Of Illusions’ rockets off at high velocity, the band planting their feet on the old school heavy metal monitor, waking up every headbanger in the world! I tell ya readers if you’re not banging your head right now, why the fuck not! The album’s first two songs have been phenomenally head bang-able, just imagine what the rest are gonna be like! Well, imagine no more, for I’ll tell ya – ‘Nightmare’, is exactly how traditional heavy metal should sound, Stormhunter echoing a forty-year-old aura perfectly. And bear in mind, that forty-year-old aura was created, pioneered, invented call it what you will, over five hundred miles away in good old Great Britain courtesy of legendary bands such as Angel Witch, Iron Maiden, Samson and Saxon – the German outfit are showing fantastic prowess and panache! Mind you, Stormhunter are one of the latest bands to emerge from Germany, a country that has an incredible legacy for producing metal bands – I’m not even gonna mention some of them here, there’s just way too many to mention! So let’s carry on with Stormhunter and their latest album ‘Best Before: Death’ – ‘Fallen Angel’ marching on with more elegance and majesty than everything heard so far, the band adopting an anthemic mid-tempo thunder stomp. The dropping of a couple of gears here is nothing short of emphatic, ‘Fallen Angel’ pounding the ground hard, shaking buildings to their foundations, and causing seismic events to appear all over the world!
The impact of ‘Best Before: Death’ so far has been fucking huge, Stormhunter firing on all cylinders to deliver an explosive and fast-paced heavy metal album – ‘Death’ picking up the pace to resume the all-out metal attack of earlier. And with much more melodious intent than any other song so far, ‘Death’ a smile-inducing gallop that’s gonna have every listener, fan and follower raising their fists high and punching the air in eargasmic delight! I tell ya, readers, ‘Best Before: Death’ is simply getting better and better with each song that storms on by – ‘Empty Shell’ hitting the ground running with a stunning amount of energy! The pace is electric, the band sizzling with a red hot swagger – a swagger that’s gonna attract thrashers to the bands soundscape too! Yes readers, thrashers are gonna find this album just as attractive as metallers, Stormhunter proudly standing on the bridge between the genre of thrash, and traditional heavy metal – a bridge that I’ve been stood on for over four decades! And musically, there’s no other place I’d rather be – ‘Vagabond’ entering the fray to assume the title of the fastest song heard so far! With a head-bang ability that’s just smashed through the fucking roof, ‘Vagabond’ is a pulsating slab of heavy metal, slamming listeners to the floor with immense force! ‘Best Before: Death’ has been unforgiving since it began, maintaining a strong hold on everyone, keeping their attentions glued to every song that rolls on by. What an album! And what a band!
And without pausing for a breather, Stormhunter roar on with ‘Berceau De L’Enfer’ – a breathtaking barrage of old school heavy metal rising high in the air, along with everyone’s fists too! ‘Berceau De L’Enfer’ is just so damn infectious, every metalhead in the world is gonna be rocking their head back and forth at an extremely high rate of knots – boy there’s gonna be some sore necks in the morning! But there’s no use worrying about that now, for there’s still two more songs to come, the first of which ‘War Is Peace’, returns the elegance and majesty heard earlier (on ‘Fallen Angel’) – the band maintaining the albums superb intensity at an all time high! The heavy metal on offer here has been some of the best heard this year, the band powering their way into contention for the Album Of The Year title – and I for one wouldn’t bet against them! ‘Best Before: Death’ is brought to a close with the two-minute-long instrumental ‘A Mourning In August’ – the band ending their fourth album with an air of a warm down after an intense physical workout! This is kinda apt really, for ‘Best Before: Death’ has been one helluva workout, especially for the neck muscles of every single listener everywhere.
Overall, a fast-paced and feisty gallop of unabashed heavy metal, highly head bang-able and incredibly infectious.
TRACKLIST
Morituri Te Salutant
Reaper
Altar Of Illusions
Nightmare
Fallen Angel
Death
Empty Shell
Vagabond
Berceau De L’Enfer
War Is Peace
A Mourning In August
Stormhunter: Facebook
Release Year: 2024
Label: MDD Records
Category: Album
Country: Germany
Reviewed by Iron Mathew for Frenzy Fire and Metal-Roos.
