You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

It’s third time lucky for the veteran Bay Area metalheads. This is the third studio album in a row where they’ve kept the same line-up, and also the third one where they’ve worked with producer Jason Suecof. The result is one of their most accomplished albums in a three-decade span of releases.

There’s still the riffing fire from guitarists Rob Cavestany and Ted Aguilar, as on the pacy Cause For Alarm and Hell To Pay. But this is set against a more mature stance that never detracts from the band’s overall energy and power, but gives the music an extra dimension.

When you listen to The Electric Cell or Hatred United, United In Hate, what comes through is the feel of a confident metal band who’ve expanded their repertoire. There are slightly more progressive ideas, done within the range of the traditional band style. It makes for quality throughout.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.