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 Midlands has long been a fertile ground for producing rock bands of the heavier persuasion, but for some reason the city that’s currently big news in the sporting arena has never quite punched its weight in the higher divisions of popular music.

In an attempt to rectify that situation, this quartet have built on their 2012 debut Monumental by re-recording some of its tracks and adding new material.

It’s those more recent songs that stand out: the churning grunge of Bats and the muddy, staccato riffage of Crystal, while the title track and Fire In The Hole benefit from menacing backing vocal whispers and a touch of light-and-shade melodramatics. All of which suggests this is a band in transition to a future that definitely sounds promising but perhaps needs another long-player to be fully realised.

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.