Twilight Force: Blade Of Immortal Steel
There’s a common misconception that power metal isn’t an emotive genre. Its detractors, and even some of its fans, tend to view it as being rather silly. It’s what happens when you take IRON MAIDEN and turn everything up to eleventy-stupid. Power metal is where you find Hobbit ballads, Catholic Priests that are cursed to transform into werewolves, and armour-clad warriors obsessed with hammers. There’s no room for any kind of emotional depth! There are Orcs at the gate and we have to charge into battle or the kingdom is doomed! And yet, when TWILIGHT FORCE were writing one of their new songs, they found themselves tearing up.
According to keyboardist Blackwald, it caught them completely off-guard. “Everyone is trying to evoke emotion and we managed to make ourselves feel sad!” He tells us over Zoom. “It was a new sensation, we were laughing through tears about how sad we were.”
Said track, Highlands Of The Elder Dragon, is ten and a half minutes of epic power metal, revolving around a man who devotes his life to finding immortality and ultimately fails. The protagonist is a tragic figure, obsessed with cheating death but unable to escape his inevitable fate. Despite being set in a fantastical world, it’s strangely relatable. It might be set in a larger-than-life world, but the lead is recognisably human, and when he reaches his end, it’s tragic. He’s spent mortality chasing an unobtainable goal and missed out on far too much.
It’s just one of the eight songs/short stories that form At The Heart Of Wintervale. Like their previous work, it’s set in The Twilight Kingdoms, a fictional universe that Blackwald created as way of adding more depth to their music.
“In this day and age, there’s so many fantasy universes out there that people love to dig into, everything from Game Of Thrones to World Of Warcraft to The Lord Of The Rings and they all have their own worlds and I figured, TWILIGHT FORCE needs our universe! It makes everything more multi-faceted and in-depth. And for me, I love writing songs that have a wider context. It makes it even more enjoyable,” he explains. “In the past we’ve made references to The Twilight Kingdoms but they’ve been more like metaphors, and less concrete stuff. We’ve spent a lot of time writing lyrics that are stories with a beginning, middle and end. It’s not a concept album though, it’s seven separate tales. A collection of short stories rather than a single big one.”
He’s calling us from The Twilight Forge, his home studio where he’s spent months working on the album. He’s an affable and engaging conversationalist, more than happy to talk at length with near-strangers about dragons, wood elves and necromancers. The universe he’s created isn’t limited to the music either; pick up a physical copy of the album and you’ll get maps, artwork, and details about the stories that expand upon this fantastical world.
As it’s an entirely original creation, TWILIGHT FORCE aren’t bound by an established intellectual property. They’ve got a freedom that other fantasy-themed bands don’t. BLOODBOUND can’t suddenly write a song about Jaime Lannister growing his hand back and running off with his daughter-in-law, but TWILIGHT FORCE can do as they please.
Speaking of which, there’s a brief sequence on this record which we’re fairly confident has never been done in the history of power metal. The song Sunlight Knight is a fairly typical genre anthem, filled with upbeat, galloping riffs and soaring vocals until it takes an odd turn: it turns into a reggae song. “It was just one of those things that matched with the story,” Blackwald says when we ask him about it. “The hero goes out into the world, he levels up at this part. He needs to return the sunlight to some villagers, he stole the sunlight to level up. And we figured the centre of the song was ‘sunlight,’ so it just fit to have a bit of a Caribbean vibe. We couldn’t believe how well it worked! Sometimes you throw things at the wall and they stick! We weren’t trying to shoehorn it in, it started out as a joke, but it worked!”
He’s right. Sunlight Knight’s transformation into a delightful, summertime calypso track makes no sense when written down, but damn, it really works! It was already a good song, but this abrupt, leftfield turn makes it one of the most enjoyable cuts on offer. TWILIGHT FORCE almost certainly won’t turn into a full-time, “power-reggae” band, but the brief moment they do is a blast.
It’s likely to raise a few eyebrows when they head out on tour. By the time this article goes to press, they’ll be somewhere in Europe with SEVEN SPIRES and SILVER BULLET, and they’re hoping to be on the festival circuit this summer. There are going to be lots of opportunities to catch TWILIGHT FORCE this year, which is drastically different to how they started. One curious line from their Wikipedia page states their first show was in Madrid, and despite our scepticism, it’s true! They genuinely did play their debut gig 2000 miles from home. As Blackwald explains.
“We weren’t even aiming to play live. We didn’t know that would ever happen but our singer at the time, he got asked to perform with one of his other bands in Madrid but they couldn’t do it. So he just said out of the blue, ‘I’ve got this power metal band,’ shall we play instead? The promoter liked us and we flew out to play our first gig! It was a real trial by fire but it made us realise we could do this. Somehow, we ended up playing SABATON OPEN AIR next. We were really thrown into the deep end.”
Over a decade later, they’ve got an early contender for one of the best power metal albums of the year. Yes, it has more than its fair share of dragons and over-the-top heroism, but the characters in it are more than just stereotypes. They’ve got hopes and aspirations and sometimes, they fail. At The Heart Of Wintervale will certainly make you want to charge headlong into an Uruk Hai horde while singing your battle hymns, but once the roar of combat has died away, you might just shed a tear.
At The Heart Of Wintervale is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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