Stryper’s latter-day streak of great albums that started with ‘Murder by Pride’ (2009) came to a screeching halt with the bland ‘Even the Devil Believes’ (2020) and the severely underdeveloped ‘The Final Battle’ (2022). Although ‘When We Were Kings’ doesn’t quite reach the heights of 2015’s ‘Fallen‘ – which might just be Stryper’s best album – it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to realize that ‘When We Were Kings’ has been put together with a lot more care than its two predecessors. It contains some obvious nods to Stryper’s eighties heyday, but also fits the more metallic trend of their recent albums.

First off, ‘When We Were Kings’ simply sounds better than its predecessor. ‘The Final Battle’ sounded like a demo that was released as a final product, and not even a very good demo. ‘When We Were Kings’ sounds notably more elaborate and polished. Mixing engineer Danny Bernini also seems to slowly get a better grasp of how to mix Robert Sweet’s drums so that his snares don’t sound like massive, reverberating cardboard plates that overpower everything. Most importantly, however, Michael Sweet’s songwriting just feels more inspired this time around, with especially the first half of the album having some true gems.

Whoever picked the singles for the album did an incredible job, as they give a very good impression of the scope of the album. ‘Grateful’ and the title track would not have sounded out of place on Stryper’s best-selling ‘To Hell with the Devil’ album, with those huge vocal harmonies in their choruses, though the guitar work is unmistakably twenty-first century Stryper. Opening track and album highlight ‘End of Days’ leans more heavily on the riffs and the guitar harmonies, while ‘Loves Symphony’ is a somewhat more epic work that follows the tradition of the more bombastic mid-tempo tracks Stryper released in recent years.

Other highlights include the tight, riffy ‘Trinity’, the highly dynamic ‘Rhyme of Time’ and the surprisingly good power ballad ‘Betrayed by Love’. Stryper’s ballads tend to be so saccharine that they strip your teeth of all their enamel – ‘Grateful’ doesn’t entirely escape that – but the more guitar-heavy approach gives ‘Betrayed by Love’ a far more powerful character. There is a bit of a quality drop-off four songs before the end, but by that point, you will already have heard more good music than on Stryper’s last two albums combined. Also, none of the last four songs is outright bad. In fact, the mid-tempo stomper ‘Divided by Design’ is quite good.

Ultimately, ‘When We Were Kings’ has the same strengths and weaknesses as most modern-day Stryper albums. It just has better fixes for the latter. An actual uptempo song to break up the stream of mid-tempo tracks would have improved the album, but the increased amount of melodic variety makes that nearly unnecessary. Even the lyrics should not be as big a stumbling block for atheist scum like myself as they were in the eighties. Also, Michael Sweet’s voice is still in good shape, and there is plenty of great guitar work courtesy of him and Oz Fox. And that’s exactly how a good Stryper album should sound.

Recommended tracks: ‘End of Days’, ‘Trinity’, ‘Rhyme of Time’, ‘Betrayed by Love’