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If your bag is early 80s metal, then you’ll enjoy Skull Fist’s feast of Accept riffs, Exciter pace and Heavy Load anthems.

These Canadians are an unashamed throwback to a bygone era when things were so much simpler, and this album proves that such an approach can still pay rich dividends.

Hurtling into opener Head Of The Pack, Skull Fist rarely let up on the energy or passion as they deliver a collection of songs where the title says it all: Ride The Beast, Tear Down The Wall and No False Metal are never gonna be urban tunes.

Only on the slow-burning Commit To Rock and the impressive, mid-tempo Ride On do the band allow themselves a little breather. And it all ends in a blaze of armour-plated glory with Attack Attack, which brings up the big weapons to end in suitably rampant fashion.

The gods of roar have new champions.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.