DragonForceWarp Drive Warriors

Somewhere in the middle of the last decade DragonForce lost their way.

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With Fred Leclercq handling most of the songwriting for a while, they had avoided becoming a parody of themselves until Reaching Into Infinity proved to be reaching too far. Extreme Power Metal tipped the scales back a little but then a couple of things happened – Leclercq departed and COVID shut them down from touring.

The time since then seems to have been used to take stock and re-evaluate their direction, but because it’s DragonForce, they haven’t really changed all that much. Do they still want to be the fastest band of all time? Do they still want to be the pop-punk of the metal world? Yes, and yes, but Warp Drive Warriors is also a nod to their ancient past, when Herman Li and Sam Totman took all the excess trappings of 90s power metal and stripped it down to merely upbeat songs played at ridiculous speed. Everything is still faster than it has any right to be, the choruses will get anyone who can keep up punching the air and Li and Totman shred at interdimensional velocities. Astro Warrior Anthem is every DragonForce song you’ve ever heard – stupidly fast, stupidly long, lightspeed guitar histrionics. Power of the Triforce takes on the Legend of Zelda with no sign of slowing down and so far this is everything even the most casual fan has come to expect.

Warp Speed Warriors is enormous fun … big vocals, big songs!

It’s Doomsday Party that’s easily the album highlight, bringing a distinctive 80s rock vibe and almost danceable catchiness into the reckless speed of the guitar solos and the old-school video game sounds. The cover of Wildest Dream at the end is fun in a what-if-DragonForce-covered-Taylor-Swift way but otherwise completely unnecessary and the bonus version of the album has several of the songs redone with guests like Matt from Trivium, Nita Strauss and Arch Enemy’s Alissa White-Gluz for some reason, probably just to see if any of them can keep the pace. They do, but why? Like every DragonForce album, Warp Speed Warriors is enormous fun, but like so many of their albums, it’s another victory for style over substance, big vocals, big songs, mind-numbing guitar dexterity but not much to remember about it when it’s over. It’s fun while it lasts, though.

STANDOUT TRACKS: Doomsday Party, The Killer Queen, Pixel Prison
STICK THIS NEXT TO: Stratovarius, Gloryhammer, Rhapsody