Spain’s Hitten are back with their latest album – their fifth studio full-length – and what a glorious racket they’ve made on it.

The band have been working for quite some while to find that sweet spot where early eighties raw meets late eighties polish, and you’d have to say that on this album they’ve finally achieved their goal. Tracks like Unholy Games, which a cynic might say sounds just like Europe jamming on Whitesnake‘s Crying in the Rain but to the faithful actually sounds like the noise we’ve been waiting for since 1993 – absolutely usher in a new golden era for hair metal maniacs who for too long have been forced to rely on trouser-straining gumbies and smirking ironists to provide them even a meagre fix of ‘the real thing’.

Obviously that’s a nonsense thing to say – this type of music has long has it’s day, but there’s no denying the frisson of excitement you’ll get when listening to fast-paced, gonzoid anthems like Dark Stalker and Crimetime, both of which would be much-loved classics by now had they been released in 1989. Johnny Lorca and Dani Meseguer are a dynamite guitar team – and more importantly they enjoy reminding you of that fact over and over again – slipping between Downing/Tipton and Schenker/Jabs on the fast stuff whilst always keeping a bit of Sykes and Lynch in the back pocket just in case, and the pair really do weave Lord Coverdale‘s beloved sonic tapestries all over the shop. Their combined work alongside vocalist Alexx Panza on the hit-single-in-waiting Truthful Lies is absolutely monstrous, as it is on the already-mentioned Crimetime, a song so good it’s, um, criminal…

But all hyperbole aside, if you were around when this kind of music was huge, I implore you to break out of your stern-faced ‘music were better in my day’ fug and just immerse yourself in this. Nostalgia is fine, but when it’s updated and tweaked, primped and preened into shiny, glistening new form it’s sometimes even better than the real thing, as the blessed Archbishop Hewson of Bono might have said…