LA-based Romanian rockers Persekutor promise no irony on their new album Snow Business; By which I guess they mean they are deadly serious when cranking out riff-heavy nuggets of melodic mayhem like Suck City. This is undoubtedly good news, because, to my increasingly fevered brain, their a deal too much irony going on in the world of heavy metal in 2023. A band playing heavy metal as it should be played simply for the love of it? I’ll ‘ave some of that!

It’s not straightforward HM, mind; rather Persekutor offer up a sort of groovy death-infused rock kinda like fin de siècle Finns Gandalf did back in the day. It’s got all the influences you’d like – certainly enough trad metal traces to qualify as such, anyways – but Vlad The Inhaler‘s vocals are rooted square in death metal territory, meaning the material, though always melodic, still retains that nasty, erm, venomous edge…

Consequently Thundersnow – a mid album highlight – packs some big NWoBHM punches in the riff n’solo department whilst being a whole different beast as far as overall feel is concerned. I like this ‘difficult’ dichotomy, and the band pulls it off with enough aplomb so as to avoid simply falling between the various stools they are trying to occupy. That’s a pretty neat trick to be able to pull it off, as I’m sure you’re aware.

Things come together best on the riotous Night Job, which fuses Scorpions at their Hurricane-rockin’ riffmungous best to something that sounds like it might have been released on the Noise Records label in about 1984; Songwriting credit Schenker–Jabs–Petrozza maybe?

But, all crazy hypothesizing aside, the bottom line is Persekutor have taken all the bits of heavy metal’s glory decade that they love and moulded them into something quite marvellous to behold. It’s not new by any means – but my it sounds pretty fresh from where I’m standing. And if rollicking trips back in time like Haloween ’91 don’t have you up in the attic looking for your by-now-three-sizes-too-small denim cutoff then there’s a fair chance that Sentinel Daily isn’t the right web-based heavy metal magazine for you…

Snow Business releases on June 23rd.