Judas Priest Deluxe

Invincible Shield is the nineteenth studio album by British heavy metal band Judas Priest. Announced onstage at Power Trip festival in California, the new record marks the band's first release in 6 years, having recently celebrated 50 years in music.
Judas Priest have been in a class of their own for decades now. It’d be easy to wax lyrical on how crazy it is that the Brummie legends are at their top of their game in their sixth decade as a band, or how wild that frontman Rob Halford is still the gold-studded standard for metal frontmen at 72 years old, or how staggering that they still go about their business with the insatiable vigour of artists with anything left to prove…

More than 50 years into their heavy metal legacy, Judas Priest are still screaming at full power on their 19th studio full-length Invincible Shield. The album, their first studio effort of its kind since 2018's Firepower, is again produced by the band's touring guitarist Andy Sneap, and its 14 songs stretch out at over just an hour-long runtime. The album charges out of the gate with the dumbfounding riffery of "Panic Attack." The song touches on all the now-signature elements of Priest's sound, with dizzying harmonic guitar solos, a relentlessly pushy beat, and layers of Rob Halford's vocals, part winking metal theater, part authentic menace.

In many ways the fifth Judas Priest studio album, "Hell Bent for Leather" (aka "Killing Machine" outside the US) released in the fall of 1978 is the band's definitive album, showcasing all their strengths and epitomizing what this heavy metal group is all about. The album was produced during the period they adopted the "leather & studs" style breaking new ground in heavy metal sound and image. Although gothic themes are present the album isn't truly dark or morbid, the band is as aggressive and brutally intense as ever. The blistering two-guitar attack and shreds of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing will melt your head - the solos have some serious attitude, and by now Rob Halford had established his quite unique, much lower and more menacing, vocal style…

Predating Metallica's self-titled blockbuster by 11 years, Judas Priest's British Steel was a similarly pitched landmark boasting many of the same accomplishments. It streamlined and simplified the progressive intricacies of a band fresh off of revolutionizing the entire heavy metal genre; it brought an aggressive, underground metal subgenre crashing into the mainstream (in Priest's case, the NWOBHM; in Metallica's, thrash); and it greatly expanded the possibilities for heavy metal's commercial viability as a whole. Of course, British Steel was nowhere near the sales juggernaut that Metallica was, but in catapulting Judas Priest to the status of stadium headliners…

Whether looking for salvation or redemption, one need look no further than Lord of the Lost's monumental endeavor "Judas" for gothic metal gospel and the saccharine sweetness of something close to faith…