Hard Rock Reviews
As much as I like to call myself and this site Kevy Metal, my journey into music actually began with hard rock. Seventies and nineties hardrock – plus contemporary bands inspired by these styles – are still a significant part of what I listen to, and therefore, Album of the Week reviews on hard rock bands are published frequently. You can find all of them right here. Overlaps with my heavy metal reviews inevitably exist.
Looking for something specific, but can’t find it by browsing the reviews? Searching by artist name or release title using the search bar might bring up some Album of the Week reviews I have written before I started tagging my reviews properly.
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Album of the Week 32-2025: Onmyo-za – Ginrei Gozen
Onmyo-za has a clearly defined style, to the point where even bands that try to imitate them end up not sounding all that much like them. The exact balance between their traditional heavy metal and seventies hard rock riffs, their very accessible melodic sensibilities, their subtle folky touches, and the…
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Album of the Week 30-2025: Alice Cooper – The Revenge of Alice Cooper
While I enjoy nearly everything Alice Cooper – the singer – has done through the years, there is just something special about the recordings he has made with the original Alice Cooper band. Now, this could be a simple matter of youth, but ‘The Revenge of Alice Cooper’ proves beyond…
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Album of the Week 29-2025: Styx – Circling from Above
Enjoying Styx is apparently frowned upon by many American rock aficionados. Fortunately, I am European, and I don’t give a damn. In fact, the band deserves a fair amount of respect in my book for not just being a nostalgia-driven legacy act as they could have done – and as…
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Album of the Week 21-2025: Inglorious – V
Like so many Frontiers bands, Inglorious is built around a fantastic singer, in this case Nathan James, whose fantastic hard rock voice I personally discovered when he was elevating old Scorpions songs in Uli Jon Roth’s band about a decade ago. When they announced a hiatus after the departure of…
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Album of the Week 18-2025: Deathless Legacy – Damnatio Aeterna
Honesty forces me to say that I didn’t quite know what to expect from Deathless Legacy’s sixth album ‘Damnatio Aeterna’. 2022’s ‘Mater Larvarum’ didn’t quite resonate with me as well as their other releases, but it is possible that its larger emphasis on vaguely Powerwolfy pop metal than usual was…
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Album of the Week 13-2025: Smith/Kotzen – Black Light/White Noise
Four years ago, the self-titled debut album by Smith/Kotzen completely blew me away, eventually topping my Best of 2021 list. Obviously, the immense songwriting and guitar playing skills of both Adrian Smith and Richie Kotzen weren’t unfamiliar to me, but expecting a manufactured supergroup, yet receiving one of the best…
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Album of the Week 03-2025: Avatarium – Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead
‘Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead’ is the first Avatarium album that founder Leif Edling did not contribute to at all, and that is something I see as a good thing. Ever since singer Jennie-Ann Smith and guitarist Marcus Jidell took over the songwriting, Avatarium improved. It has…
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Best of 2024: The Albums
In all honesty, I was not prepared for 2024 to be a year with such a great number of amazing new releases. In a way, it was great timing professionalizing the website halfway through a year with this release schedule, though it would be a blatant lie to chalk that…
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Album of the Week 50-2024: Pokolgép – Vissza Sose Nézz
After introducing their new singer Richárd Bánhegyesi with a single earlier this year, Pokolgép’s new album ‘Vissza Sose Nézz’ was announced less than a month before its release. Sure, the Hungarian heavy metal institution was due a new album – the excellent ‘Metálbomba’ being nearly nine years old at this…
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