Suicidal Angels: Return Of The Reaper

SUICIDAL ANGELS just upped their game. The Greek four-piece have been a constant presence on the thrash scene for over a decade now and have a lot of miles behind them, but Profane Prayer is their strongest album yet. Their eighth full-length is a powerful mix of high-octane thrash anthems and a couple of epic compositions. It’s tightly written, every song has its own personality and there is a noticeable confidence about it. SUICIDAL ANGELS were never a bad band by any means, but on Profane Prayer, they’ve thrown down a gauntlet. Want to release a thrash album in 2024? Beat this one.

It’s not surprising then that frontman Nick Melissourgos exudes a quiet confidence when he joins us to discuss the new release. He’s friendly if occasionally withdrawn company, carefully choosing each word and taking the time to think before he answers questions. And despite claiming to be “a little nervous” about its imminent release, it’s clear he knows that Profane Prayer is a killer album.

“For me personally, and the band generally speaking, it’s an album where we made another step forward,” he tells us over a video call. “Every time we make an album, we want to not stick to the atmosphere of the previous one. We want to add something new, to evolve and move forward. I think we did that with Years Of Aggression (their last record) and then even more with this one.”

This evolution is most explicit in two key tracks; Deathstalker and The Fire Paths Of Fate. The first shows up early while the latter is the closing song, but they’re both lengthy numbers and epic in scope. They’ve had a lot of work put into them, each one showing the bands’ willingness to push their boundaries and create something outside their comfort zone.

“In the very beginning, these songs were about six minutes long. But then we started adding stuff,” Nick says, “When a song starts getting longer in duration, writing gets complicated. The line between making it interesting and making it boring is very, very thin. It took us quite a lot of time because the very basic idea was just the verse, the bridge and the chorus, then we were trying to build the whole thing around it. We were paying close attention to the details to make these songs stand out.”

This painstaking approach has paid off, these two tracks elevate Profane Prayer and pull up the rest of the track list with them. The other songs are closer to SUICIDAL ANGELS’ established sound; dark thrash anthems with catchy choruses and fast riffs, but the band has put a lot of effort in to make them the best they could be. The title track sounds like a circle pit turned into a song and the opening When The Lions Die would make KREATOR green with envy. Best of the bunch though is (arguably) Return Of The Reaper, which was inspired by the world opening up again after the COVID years.

“I was writing a song about the band making a comeback from COVID. We wound up in lockdown for two years and the times were not exactly the best to start working on new songs. We also hadn’t promoted our last album at all, we’d done one tour and that was it. When they opened the borders and we did some shows for Years Of Aggression, I was working on some ideas and slowly the whole thing started building up.”

It wasn’t long before they were firing on all cylinders, but it’s still taken a long time for Profane Prayer to find its way out into the world. The outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war led to a shortage of materials for making the physical copies and they had to hold onto the masters for a while before it was their turn. Nick has had to sit patiently with a killer album on his hands, watching the months go by before he could get it out into the world.

The wait has been worth it and with luck, this record will see SUICIDAL ANGELS climb the ranks. They’ve been plugging away for years and their ascent has been gradual, but Profane Prayer is their strongest work yet. Their earliest material was enthusiastic but understandably similar to the bands they idolised, but they’ve forged a personality of their own since then. They’re darker than the MUNICIPAL WASTEs of the world, and favour topics like war and madness over skateboarding zombies and drinking.

That subtle tonal difference has helped differentiate them, but the main reason they’ve survived this is long is their commitment. There were a lot of thrash bands emerging from the underground in the mid-2000s and only a few of them remain today. SUICIDAL ANGELS are still standing because of one thing, pure determination:

“I cannot say, I don’t know what other people did wrong or right, but in our camp, our main engine for moving forward was our passion, our dedication and the effort we put into making this happen. It’s not easy to make a band a success, sometimes you have to have a side job to keep funding it, but we put in non-stop effort. I’m not saying other bands didn’t have that, just that it worked for us. You never know what happens in anyone else’s life. It’s very hard to make it in the music business.”

Profane Prayer is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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