For years, Ashes of Ares was a band that I should have liked, but could not really get into. Matthew Barlow is easily one of my favorite heavy metal singers of all time, and their original drummer Van Williams plays in Nevermore, one of my favorite bands. And yet, their first two albums left me completely cold, for some reason. ‘Emperors and Fools‘ (2022) finally saw the band living up to their potential, and its somewhat darker follow-up ‘New Messiahs’ largely continues to build upon that very same foundation. If you like your heavy metal crunchy and dramatic, it is worth a spin.

Since their earliest work, Ashes of Ares has proven how important a singer’s voice is for the overall sound of a band, even in a genre as riff-driven as heavy metal. Due to the timbre of Barlow’s voice and his overall highly dramatic delivery worthy of musical theater, Ashes of Ares will always be reminiscent of Barlow’s work fronting Iced Earth, even though the riff work of Freddie Vidales – another Iced Earth alumnus – barely sounds like their shared former band. Ashes of Ares has a somewhat more modern sound, despite the riffs clearly being rooted in traditional heavy metal and early progressive metal.

Part of why Barlow’s delivery works so well within the compositional style of Ashes of Ares is the fact that the music appears to be written to accommodate his vocals as much as possible. In a way, that is both the band’s biggest strength and its most prominent weakness. The space for the vocals is created by going for mid-tempo songs in general, and even though I think the band does much better at giving all of those songs their own identity these days than they did on their 2013 self-titled debut album, I do still think that one or two actual fast songs would do wonders for the album’s flow.

The more aggressive tracks are where I think ‘New Messiah’ excels. The opening title track offers a handful of surprisingly aggressive riffs, some of them even feeling borderline extreme metal. ‘Atrophy’ is another relatively aggressive track with great riff work, as is the great closer ‘From Hell He Rides’. The preceding ‘Lust to Feed’ is actually a bit of a hidden gem here, its twisted arpeggios and intense mid-tempo riffs being vaguely reminiscent of Nevermore and highly atmospheric to boot. The ballads are generally quite good as well. Barlow has the perfect voice for them and the oversentimentality I tend to fear is avoided nimbly.

In a way, I think the Iced Earth history of both Ashes of Ares members – it’s basically just Barlow and Vidales recording everything but the drums here – is starting to hurt them. Simply because with the very obvious exception of Barlow’s one-of-a-kind vocals, Ashes of Ares really doesn’t sound that much like Iced Earth at all. Think of them as a less technical version of early Nevermore or post-reunion Toxik and you’d be much closer to what the band actually sounds like on ‘New Messiahs’. If that sounds like it would be up your alley, you should absolutely give the album a shot.

Recommended tracks: ‘New Messiahs’, ‘Lust to Feed’, ‘From Hell He Rides’