Californian duo Tzimani are back, and how!

Their new album I Feel Fine doesn’t find the band progressing a great deal from the last time we heard from them here at Sentinel Daily – 2020’s self titled effort – but quite frankly they really don’t need to. The band has found it’s niche, and within those parameters they’ve developed a very nice line in melodic, hard-rock tinged heavy metal.

At full throttle (opening track We Stand And Fight, for instance) they’ll take you right back to the glory days of names like The Rods, or any of those classic US power metal names of the early eighties, but the key to Tzimani’s appeal is their ability to add huge doses of melody to the muscle; When they get this right, as they do on Hold On and Empty, the sound they create – like the Adrian Smith-penned Iron Maiden classics of the mid eighties – is hard to resist.

Indeed ‘this would have been a hit in 1986’ is just about the highest complement we can pay a band making this sort of music in 2024, and it’s not hard to imagine Empty blasting out of car stereos in the mid eighties… It really is that good.

The only real quibble here is the standard of the production, which sometimes leaves Eddie Vazquez a bit exposed vocally; it would be great to hear all of these tracks supported by a state of the art wall of sound, but needs must and the quality of songwriting on display is more than good enough to overcome minor complaints about sound quality. When the pair (Vazquez as ever is joined by his brother Sebastian throughout) go for broke with Van Halenesque abandon on the title track which closes out the record the last thing you’ll be thinking about is production values. This really is top notch stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough if you like proper, old school heavy metal like it used to be made.



I Feel Fine Releases on November 15th