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.

The German metal queen’s passionate fanbase must feel desperately ravenous after a six-year wait for new material. However, few artists have such a profound connection to their fans as Doro.

This sumptuous, 25-track double-disc set mitigates the delay, broadly divvying up as an album of hard rockers plus an album of soft ballads.

Doro has always decisively nailed both of these approaches, but Forever Warriors, Forever United ramps them up to the nth degree; Bastardos is Doro’s most fiery headbanger, It Cuts So Deep her most tender love song, and All For Metal her most infectious, rousing battle chant.

There’s a terrifically entertaining duet with Amon Amarth’s Johan Hegg, a tear-jerking song for Lemmy, and a general focus on precision songwriting that makes every song here a worthy, memorable addition to Doro’s long and noble canon.

Buy Forever Warriors, Forever United now from Amazon or from HMV.

Chris has been writing about heavy metal since 2000, specialising in true/cult/epic/power/trad/NWOBHM and doom metal at now-defunct extreme music magazine Terrorizer. Since joining the Metal Hammer famileh in 2010 he developed a parallel career in kids' TV, winning a Writer's Guild of Great Britain Award for BBC1 series Little Howard's Big Question as well as writing episodes of Danger Mouse, Horrible Histories, Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed and The Furchester Hotel. His hobbies include drumming (slowly), exploring ancient woodland and watching ancient sitcoms.