Featuring the formidable power vocals of Girish Pradhan, GatC are back with their third album and ready, probably, to rock your world…

Actually, there’s no probably about it. Over the course of this dozen-track long journey the band WILL rock your world time and again with anthemic thunder rockers like I’m Not The Devil, wherein our hero, who possess a voice approximately 4.7 times more powerful than any other currently doing the rounds, will remove your eyebrows and any other extraneous protruberences flapping around your person through sheer LUNG POWER…

Seriously, the man’s voice is a force of nature, but, as we never tire of saying here at Sentinel Daily, none of that actually matters if the songs the voice is given to sing are rubbish. Luckily, that isn’t the case on this rip-roaring stonker of an album.

Take Love’s Damnation as an example; built on a rumbling but simple bass line from Yogesh Pradhan, the track builds in to a devastatingly explosive mix of Skid Row, Tesla and Def Leppard that takes absolutely no prisoners as it destroys your speakers; Or the more melodic but no-less trouser tightening Clearing The Blur, which features some classic late eighties gang-vocals to further ramp up the, um, hysteria, as well as a teeth-rattlingly good solo from Siraj Tikhatri

And these aren’t even the best songs on offer; Hail To The Heroes is one of those albums that is blessed with a hatful of standouts, it’s true, and you’ll find that your fave jam changes from day to day such is the choice on offer, but there’s a fair chance that the exuberant Lover’s Train, where everything falls together in serendipitous fashion, will top your own personal charts more often than not, just as it does mine; One of the hallmarks of this album is just how well put together, how well observed everything is, and this track is the first among equals when it comes to recreating the breathless glory days of hair metal’s glory years. Not just a keeper, it’s a track that’s going to keep finding it’s way onto your stereo over the rest of 2022, mark my words.

A lot of good metal has emerged from the Indian subcontinent over the last couple of years, with names like Kryptos and Against Evil cropping up regularly in Sentinel Daily dispatches; but this is another beast altogether, an album that manages to mesh the trad metal heaviness of those two names with titanic melodic rock choruses with what would have been called ‘stadium-levelling efficiency’ back in the day. The heyday of this kind of music may be long gone, but luckily nobody told Girish and his chroniclers; is it too much to hope for that songs like this album’s staggering title track might usher in a new golden age of hair metal? Probably, but an eyelinered and aquanetted man can dream, can’t he? Anyways, to coin a phrase: I have seen the future of hair metal…

Hail To The Heroes releases on February 11th