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Heaven Shall Burn have been around the block a fair few times. It’s a fairly standard block as well. The sort of block where you’d hear a lot of rehashed Arch Enemy guitar leads and a fair few of Unearth’s bark-along vocal hooks.

Tracks like Govida contain little that’s surprising but will satisfy your need for uncomplicated metal. It starts to unravel toward the end, as songs pass with little more to report than their likeness to mid-00s In Flames.

That’s not to say it’s entirely derivative. The band add hints of variety by singing in their native German and chuck in a cover of Blind Guardian’s Valhalla, at which point you pine for the acceptable melo-death sound they previously established. Metalcore and power metal being such obviously unsuitable bedfellows, lord knows what possessed them to include it.

If this is what happens when Heaven Shall Burn venture into a different block then maybe they were wise to stay put for so long.

Since blagging his way onto the Hammer team a decade ago, Stephen has written countless features and reviews for the magazine, usually specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal, and still holds out the faint hope of one day getting his beloved U2 into the pages of the mag. He also regularly spouts his opinions on the Metal Hammer Podcast.