Judas Priest – Invincible Shield Album Review
Judas Priest’s craft is addictive; their music is infested with blistering energy, swerved with vintage colors, whilst an aura of young blood surges perpetually through the ancient gods of the metal scene. These godfathers of heavy metal needn’t fight tooth and nail for relevance — they earned their stellar legacy decades ago — but their latest LP, Invincible Shield, arrives in a thunder of eclectic light, spewing riffs like weapons and wreaking a maelstrom of life energy.
“Panic Attack” and the Promise of “Invincible Shield”
Modern metal can seem a little weathered, especially when it comes from such imperishable acts as Judas Priest, but Invincible Shield’s lead single refuted this from the oddity of its intro to the kaleidoscopes pinning its final solo into place. Panic Attack hit the scene in October ‘23, an instant classic striped with the reminiscence of the band’s career-defining 1990 LP, Painkiller.
This record recalibrates all that made vintage Priest great, its galloping colours deep with summer-ready energy, burning ceaselessly through its 14 tracks. Its grooves are cut deep as trenches, its riffs brandish the blunt, crushing force of nostalgia, whilst the instinct underpinning Rob Halford’s vocal performance remains unmatched.
“Invincible Shield”: Track Highlights
Invincible Shield’s predecessor, 2018’s Firepower, felt fragmentally washed-up and regurgatative but fought indiscriminately for survival nonetheless. This vibe haunts the majority of Priest’s more recent releases: a masked decay of originality and a tendency towards filler material. Invincible Shield can certainly cross that line in places — the chorus of its title track is a prime example, its lyrics falling sub-par against the savage passion of its guitar work. Overall, Judas Priest’s sound is searing but seems to hold a vaster potential than they dare to explore.
This hardly dulls the record’s claws, however. Invincible Shield is a vessel of organic NWOBHM that permeates feel-good brutality, charging unkemptly, excitingly, and soul-drivingly. While some tracks just leave you begging for the next section to arrive, that upcoming section always delivers.
The hypnotic Escape from Reality is strewn with phantoms of Black Sabbath; a minefield of uncanny similarities that hit hard. Devil In Disguise sleazes with 80s aesthetics, tracks like Trial By Fire are cut sharp with modernity, whilst The Lodger sculpts the bittersweet polarity of ruin and revenge with an Alice Cooper edge.
Art, Sound, and the Judas Priest Legacy
This is one of those albums where the artwork (by Mark Wilkinson, the same artist behind Painkiller), is in perfect synaesthesia with the sound. Its delivery is electric, bold and overall awesome, but treads the precipice of slipping towards clichés, albeit these are clichés that Judas Priest played part in shaping. Invincible Shield is the quintessential Priest, reanimated with a feral spark of glory. The band may have silvered from their golden age, but this record reclaims their top form.
