Well… never was an album title more apposite! When the history of heavy metal finally comes to be definitively written, there might well be a picture of these Swiss headbangers accompanying the heading EURO METAL. Nothing more, nothing less – if it’s a solid source of steel you’re after, the Sin Starlett are, indeed, your men.

But does ‘solid’ really cut it in 2022? The metal landscape is literally strewn with the carcasses of bands who mastered the basic tenets of the genre and then headed out to the highway with a fiery glow in the eyes and a discipular intensity in the heart. None of them came back, and now their hulks lay rusting, forgotten, or, worse – ridiculed when aged longhairs gather to talk about the metal wars…

Sin Starlett are a little better than that, but for all their bellicosity and chest beating, they don’t have quite enough oomph in the songwriting department to make real waves. Sitting somewhere between semi-legendary Germans Axxis and Sweden’s Bullet, they often make the right moves, but crucially the right sounds aren’t always quite so prevalent. When they do make the right noises, they have often already been used by someone else, most notably at the intro of Rule Or Obey, which is a wholesale borrowing from Queensrÿche circa 1984.

Still, there’s no doubting the lads’ sincerity, and the unvarnished joy with which they attack tunes like Straight And Ready is infectious to say the least. After a few beers down your local rock club the sub-Accept appeal of the track will doubtless be amplified a hundred fold, and at the end of the day isn’t enjoyment what heavy metal is all about? If it isn’t it should be, and much of Sin Starlett’s output on Solid Source of Steel is very enjoyable indeed in it’s own guile-free way.

Closing track Iron Stamina – surely written to be the theme to some sort of World’s Strongest Metalhead show – is an out-and-out winner, and at the very least these guys deserve major props for their devotion to the cause. Enjoyable but inessential.

Solid Source of Steel releases on February 22nd.