Giving some love to a new, currently unsigned Finnish band. Only two permanent members as far as I can see - Roi Partanen and Zsolt Szlagyi. Can't say I know either of them, but it doesn't look like either have been active in the metal scene for much longer than a few years anyway. They appear to have guest vocalists on all their tracks - Nitte Valo, Mikael Salo, Leonard F. Guillan, Stephen Baker and Juanma Draven. Again, I'd be lying if I said I knew any of these people (except Nitte Valo, as I have listened to early Battle Beast and also Burning Point).
Anyhow, their debut album (self-titled) is pretty eclectic, but that's what I love about new bands. No expectations, no conforming to a preconceived notion of what they need to sound like. Just throwing shit out there and seeing how it lands. Cyhra - Letters to Myself style. That's what I want. There are a few songs with lyrics about the Ukraine/Russia conflict, so if you don't want politics in your metal this might be a deal breaker, but to me I don't see the issue with singing about a real war any more than a fictional one. Arguably it makes more sense to do the former nowadays.
I appreciate any band that gives me a song that reminds me of old school 1990s Power Metal. The cheesy, earworm melodies, singalong chorus, crystal clear production, energetic drumming... all there.
Then you've got one song which is purely instrumental, 'Capital Punishment', which is much more standard modern melodic metal, but has gutiar sections which remind me of classic MDM which is nice. Typically I'm not hugely into instrumentals, but I like this one a lot. Dem melodies starting at 01:26 / 02:20, yessir. That's giving me good, old school scandinavian metal vibes.
Stuff like this is really what I wanted from Cyhra. Experimenting, thinking outside the box, doing something different. LtM did this really well, then NHIH and TVT were straight up boring, cookie-cutter comemrcial metal shit. Give me these lads doing something fresh any day.
