JUDAS PRIEST — British Steel (review)

JUDAS PRIEST — British Steel album cover Album · 1980 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
Kingcrimsonprog
British Steel is one of those all time classic albums, like Reign in Blood, Number Of The Beast or Paranoid. The kind of album that half the things you’ve ever read have told you is amazing and beyond reproach and the other half has told you is overrated and nowhere near the band’s best work. Sometimes its difficult to get an unbiased opinion either way.

Released in 1980, British Steel helped Judas Priest a long way in becoming the institution they are and formed a large part of the public’s perception of the band.

The album contained the hit singles ‘Breaking The Law,’ ‘Living After Midnight,’ and ‘United.’

Elsewhere; songs like ‘Rapid Fire,’ ‘Steeler,’ and ‘Grinder,’ delivered the hard and fast metal sound that helped form the basis of the thrash sound a few short years later, while tracks like ‘Metal Gods,’ and ‘You Don’t Have To Be Old To Be Wise,’ stay closer on the borders of rock.

The quality of songwriting is genuinely good and there is no filler, this is a good album plain and simple. The band took everything they had been doing over their career and compressed it down into an easy to manage collection of pure metal.

As Scott Ian is fond of stating, Judas Priest were the first band to really take up the banner of metal, to revel in the name, to champion the genre. They weren’t ashamed, they wouldn’t rather be thought of as a Blues band or a Folk band or anything else. They wanted to be metal.

The material should speak for itself as this is a great record; if you like Judas Priest you may find another album you like more, but British Steel is one of the all time classic metal albums and there’s not much you can do about that if you don’t like that situation, it may have commercial appeal, some of it may sound cheesy to you, the production may be too slick for you… but British Steel is a classic.
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