I had to do my solo for the track Powerslave, and I had the shakes, but I just went, fuck it. The next day I turned up the studio, really hungover, and there’s Martin, still up from the night before, and beside him is Robert Palmer, who lived next door to the studio. One night I was with Martin Birch, partying till three in the morning. "And in those days, some of us were rather easily distracted. “We recorded the album at Compass Point studios in Nassau," Adrian Smith told Metal Hammer in 2015. The album that sent Maiden around the world on the legendary World Slavery tour, it turned them into global megastars in the process, it is both the definitive record of the band’s first decade and the album with the best artwork of all time. Singles Aces High and 2 Minutes To Midnight easily catered for those that liked their metal to be succinct and razor-sharp, while bassist Steve Harris’ almost 14-minute adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner sounded stunning in living rooms and on the concert stage. If that’s a thing (an inspection of the track-listing will add any necessary credence to this theory). might be flawless, Powerslave is better than perfect. I said, ‘That’s a really good album, but ours is a fucking great album!’ Not long after that, Bruce did a solo album. Bruce even said to me that Queensryche had made a better concept album that ours, with Operation: Mindcrime. "Not everyone liked the album at the time. "I’ve always loved prog – Yes, Genesis, ELP – and this album’s title track was a powerful song with that prog element to it. “It was a new challenge for us, making a concept album," Steve Harris told Metal Hammer in 2015. It starts with Moonchild – an onslaught of goosebumps, guaranteed – and continues through what now reads like a laundry list of platinum-plated Maiden classics, ranging from immaculate singles Can I Play With Madness and The Evil That Men Do through to the fervent proggery of the title track and The Prophecy’s otherworldly squall. Maiden's seventh studio album is, frankly, a flawless masterpiece, and the icing on the cake of an eight-album run that has still yet to be bettered in heavy music history. Three decades on, it stands as both a blueprint and a benchmark against which all forward-thinking metal bands shall inevitably be judged.ħ) Iron Maiden - Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988) More than just the sound of a group of young musicians growing into their own skin, Ride The Lightning is a fearless declaration of independence from a band who were utterly determined to forge ahead on a path of entirely their own making. The serrated riffs underpinning Fight Fire With Fire and Ride The Lightning might have had their origins in Thrash metal, but here they were sharper, sleeker and more incisive than anything the band had previously recorded, while For Whom The Bell Tolls was a masterclass in control and dynamics, a tale of medieval conflict made all the more dramatic and affecting by its authors’ realisation that true ‘heaviness’ could be better attained by easing up on their traditional full-tilt tempos. Which, in effect, it was: when Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett joined the band on bass and lead guitar respectively, their debut album – save for Burton’s solo showcase Anaethesia (Pulling Teeth) – had already been written. In terms of songwriting, dynamics, musicianship and lyrical depth, Ride The Lightning is such a huge step on from the raw aggression of Kill ‘Em All, that it could be the work of a different band entirely. Has any metal band ever undertaken such a huge leap forward as Metallica did in the nine months between the release of Kill ‘Em All and the recording of Ride The Lightning? Metallica’s second album is, indisputably, a masterpiece.
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