Released this summer, the new album from Texan quartet THUNDER HORSE is a heavy metal slap in the face the likes of which we haven’t experienced in a long time! Sticking to the formula they’ve been honing for three records now, it’s now impossible to pigeonhole the latter, given how they have blended and stirred the sounds and ambiances on this new one. For the better!
When a Texan band names itself after the biggest oil field in the USA, you’d expect some coarse, redneck-friendly, and Dixie flag-waving music. Fortunately, this is not the case, and this is actually quite the opposite: the lyrics are a call for revolution, urging people to take back control of their lives and not let themselves be manipulated. In short: WAKE UP! Of course, such a speech could only have an impact with monumental riffs and songwriting that perfectly matched the word meter.
Each track could be an uprising anthem, accompanying hordes of underprivileged insurgents heading with drool on their lips and flamethrowers in their hands towards the headquarters of the multinationals that exploit them on a daily basis. The drums, hammered like steel coming out of a blast furnace, perfectly mark the steps of the angry crowd, while guitars are as sharp as cleavers only to serve Stephen Bishop’s vocals, who is more than ever the evil crooner that Al Jourgensen should have been if he hadn’t lost himself in dope.
It’s hard not to think of Ministry’s “Filth Pig” when listening to Thunder Horse, so much so that the slowness, the vocals, the heaviness and wickedness of the riffs create an even more apocalyptic version than that of the Chicagoans. Rest assured, the Texans are not an industrial metal cover band, and deliver heavy rock at its most deadly and desperate.
This intensity is peaking all throughout the album, with barely one acoustic break halfway through, and it’s only with exhaustion that we come to the end of these eight pamphlets, instantly ready to do it all again, endlessly and until the world burns. Is this really the end? It’s up to you to decide how much more you want to endure… But Thunder Horse will accompany the Big Night with perfection.
Last modified: 6 November 2023
