The argument this record picks is an old one, and it has nothing to do with speed. The Swedes who built their name on velocity spend Nostalgia asking whether velocity was ever the point, and they ask it by walking into the diner at closing time, feeding the jukebox every coin in their pockets and playing 1985 back loud enough to crack the glass on the front panel. The machine lights up. Not every bulb in it works.
Released on 5 May 2023 through Nuclear Blast, four years after Zenith had already begun steering this band away from pure speed metal and toward hard rock, the sixth Enforcer album was recorded, engineered and mixed by Olof Wikstrand at the band's own Hvergelmer Studios in Arvika, with his brother Jonas on drums and keyboards. It runs a little over forty minutes, and nearly every song on it is finished inside four. Nobody was brought in to tidy any of it. That shows.
Wikstrand has been plain about what he was chasing, and it was not another speed record.
I really wanted to do an album that could work as an entirety. But also where every song could represent a single for the band.
Olof Wikstrand, BraveWords, 8 May 2023
In the same interview he named his models, the big rock albums built out of variety rather than attrition, Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell and AC/DC's Back in Black. There is the ambition, said out loud, and there is the trap sitting right next to it. A jukebox stocked with nothing but singles is a fine thing to stand in front of at two in the morning. It is a much harder thing to play from end to end.
What has not moved an inch is the guitar playing. "Unshackle Me" comes in on the kind of twin riff Saxon and UFO had worked out before this band existed, all downstroke and forward lean, and "At the End of the Rainbow" could have walked off an early Iron Maiden record without changing its trousers. Those two say plainly that nothing was left behind on the way to the diner. The old tools came along. They are being used on different furniture.
Then there is "Coming Alive", the first single and the least negotiable thing on the album: three minutes at Motörhead velocity with the snare kicked into the red and no quarter asked anywhere in it. Put it on and the whole fond backward glance falls away for the length of one song. Under the chrome this is still a speed band, and it takes exactly that long to prove it.
The production is the quiet triumph here and the thing that stops the homage turning into fancy dress. Wikstrand mixed the album in analogue fashion, and the result has air in it: drums that sound like a room rather than a plug-in, guitars with edge and no gloss on them, a low end you feel without owning a subwoofer. Records that reach backwards usually get this wrong by buffing the past until it gleams like a showroom floor. This one leaves the fingerprints on the chrome.
"Metal Supremacía" is the record's best trick and the proof that the singles talk was not empty. Its title is Spanish and its chorus needs no translation at all, a hook that does the shouting on the song's behalf, and it is the one thing here that travels without a passport. "Kiss of Death" works the same seam with a broader grin, camp played completely straight, and it is better for refusing to wink at anybody.
The ballad in the middle of the floor
"Nostalgia" itself is where this album divides a room, and it ought to. It is a power ballad, unapologetic, the song the band put its own name on, and the reading you take of it decides the number you put at the bottom. Hear it as the moment the diner empties and one couple stays on the floor while the last record plays, and it is the bravest thing on here. Hear it as a speed band reaching for a lighters-in-the-air moment it has not quite earned, and it is the soft centre of the album. I take the second reading, and not by much. Wikstrand sings it beautifully. The song under the singing is holding something back.
That holding back is the one real fault, and it spreads. "No Tomorrow" is the song I would cut without a second thought, a competent chorus bolted to nothing in particular, and the stretch around it is where a tight forty minutes starts to feel like a long forty minutes. None of the material is bad. Not all of it is necessary, and a record that sets out to be nothing but singles has to answer for the ones that turned out to be only songs. "When the Thunder Roars (Cross Fire)" hauls the tempo back up at the end and "Keep the Flame Alive" sells its chorus hard, and between them they do not quite lift the sag out of the middle.
A very good hard rock album is wearing a great speed metal band's jacket, and the jacket still fits better.
What it costs to ignore it
On any honest reading Nostalgia is a band choosing breadth over attrition and paying the standard price for it: more ways in, fewer knockouts. Anyone who wants the record that hammers for forty minutes without once looking up already owns Diamonds and should go back to it, because this is not that and was never trying to be. Anyone who wants to hear what happens when a speed band sits down and learns to write a chorus big enough for a room should start at "Coming Alive" and work outwards from there. It is generous, it is warmly made, it is a little too pleased with two or three of its own songs, and it will keep the neon on over that diner for a few years yet. Just do not expect every record in the machine to be one you want to hear twice.