Sanhedrin – Heat Lightning
New York power trio Sanhedrin return with another slice of straight up in-your-face heavy metal with their fourth album, Heat Lightning, which opens up with four of the best metal tracks we’ve heard so far this year.
Opening track, Blind Wolf, starts us off with a creepy, menacing guitar riff before blazing, melodic heavy metal kicks in and we’re racing through a fast paced, ripping heavy metal track with a crunching guitar solo. Title track, and also stand out track, Heat Lightning, introduces a softer element reminiscent of 80s melodic rock/AOR before kicking back into the metal, and the following tracks also don’t disappoint; the driving, Above The Law, could easily have been written by Rob Halford and Co. and the strutting, brooding heavy metal of, The Fight Of Your Life, could be Ghost meets early Mötley Crüe. So far so good and up to this point this album is a definite contender for Album Of The Year!
The mid-point sees a change of pace with the dark, brooding and doom-laden, King Of Tides; Ozzy era Sabbath meets early Maiden anyone? After this however the album does take something of a downturn and the songs that follow definitely don’t hit the highs of those opening tracks. We do see a brief resurgence with the song, High Threshold For Pain, which is easily the heaviest on the album bordering on straight up thrash metal in the choruses, but the quality again dips with the closing track which is simply just too long.
Production overall is good; the bass is a little wooly in places and the vocals could have been louder in the mix in parts but overall there are no real issues. The musicianship however is excellent: vocalist Erica Stoltz is a great singer and really put me in mind of Ann Wilson in her prime or even Pat Benatar but with a real metal edge, and a real point must be made to mention the guitar work here which is exceptional, particularly the soloing. Guitarist Jeremy Sosville is a master of his craft and provides us with some of the best and most melodic rock guitar soloing I’ve heard on an album in years.
The only real criticism of this album would be that it’s very heavily front-loaded; the first five songs, and particularly the first four, are some of the best heavy metal tracks you’re gonna hear this year but the second half of the album unfortunately just isn’t up to the same standard. If the track sequencing had been different, maybe the weaker songs could have been better supported overall but this isn’t the case. Maybe this was an intentional decision by the band as from a streaming perspective, where often listeners won’t listen to an album in it’s entirety, this may well work and grab the attention quickly but when listening to the album as a whole the track sequencing really is disappointing. All that said this is still a very good album and it’s highly likely that it’ll still be in my list of top albums at the end of the year.
Rating: 7/10 – Very Good
Label: Metal Blade Records
Released: March 14th 2025
Wayne McAloon | Now Spinning Magazine
