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 45-2025: Mägo de Oz – Malicia: La Noche de las Brujas
With a ten-piece line-up and a musical approach that just screams “let’s throw everything at the wall and see if it sticks”, Mägo de Oz may come across as sort of a traveling circus rather than a band. And, to be fair, ‘Malicia: La Noche de las Brujas’ is on…
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Album of the Week 44-2025: Aria – Kogda Nastanyet Zavtra
Aria celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. Many veteran bands would be on auto-pilot after such a long period of uninterrupted activity, releasing a compilation album or a live release to mark the occasion. Ever since their best singer Mikhail Zhitnyakov joined the band in 2011, however, Aria has been…
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Album of the Week 38-2025: Amorphis – Borderland
The line between having a clearly defined style and going through the motions is a very fine one. While Amorphis has sporadically found itself on the wrong side of that line – 2011’s ‘The Beginning of Times’ comes to mind – it is genuinely amazing how they have a sound…
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EP of the Week 36.5: Traversus – Navigate
Few young bands excite me quite as much as Traversus does. There is something about the way the Dutch quartet mixes the complexity of progressive metal with the accessibility of melodic rock music that simply works. Traversus manages to avoid the pitfalls of both styles in a way even veterans…
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Album of the Week 35-2025: Glenn Hughes – Chosen
Very few musicians of his generation keep as busy as Glenn Hughes. Even those who are still active generally keep a more manageable schedule, but at 74, Hughes is either on tour or in the studio continuously. Albums with his voice and bass playing are still being released every year…
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Album of the Week 34-2025: Helloween – Giants & Monsters
Helloween’s second album with their supersized all-star line-up is a fairly logical follow-up to what they were doing on ‘Helloween‘ (2021). ‘Giants & Monsters’ features a similar mix of a contemporary, bombastic take on the power metal sound the band pioneered in the eighties, and occasional AOR leanings, but it…
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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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