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Now celebrating their 20th anniversary, Filter have always been one of those bands who threatened to be so much more than they’ve ever become. In a way, the band’s sixth album sums up the dilemma.

There’s no doubting Filter’s melodic consistency. Songs like Surprise, Watch The Sun Come Out Tonight and First You Break It have a pop essence shagging industrial grooves. It makes the music highly accessible, while retaining a dark edge. And there’s also gritty riffing splayed all over What Do You Say and This Finger’s For You.

But where do Filter fit? They’re too lightweight for most metal fans, too pop for many industrial fans,yet also slightly too fierce for melodic rock fans. So, the danger is that an album like this will fall through the cracks. But bollocks to categorisation. The quality shines through here with so much individual confidence that the album deserves to be hailed. As they prove on the anthemic Burn It and the moody It’s My Time, this band have an undying creative, restive urge.

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.