Tell them, my song.

The new Unleash The Archers album has been released today.

The band is not as well known as, let’s say, Iced Earth, but they should be.  The archers have risen to the top of their game, they’ve found their style and rhythm and master their unique voice of Heavy Metal.

Apex is a powerful new album, vastly improving on its already strong predecessor Time Stands Still.

But simply let the music speak for itself. Below is a collection of official videos that you can find on YouTube.

Enjoy – and add their albums to your collections!

(From Apex.)

(From Time Stands Still.)

(From Time Stands Still.)

(From Time Stands Still.)

(From Demons Of The AstroWaste.)

I’ve spent the last couple of hours watching Iron Maiden’s “Flight 666” documentary. Again. And while I was at it, I took a nice sip of Caribbean Rum and vented a bit of steam and relaxed. The last year at work has been stressful. And I don’t even want to summarize the last decade of my job life.

But none of that is the point. The point is that, after all these years, this very specific music still is a magic wand.

I’ve been listening to Maiden since 1982. I got hooked to Maiden with the “Killers” album, which I obtained by trading in two “Rasa” albums that my mother bought on a parking lot of a local super market from some young Hare Krishna guy. The music of the Krishna band “Rasa” was not my cup of tea. But when I first heard the Maiden’s song “Killers”, I just knew what my music was and the guy who owned the Maiden album of the same name was willing to trade it for the two “Rasa” albums.

A few months later, still being an extremely young an immature teenager, I stumbled across the “The Number Of The Beast” album and bought it. It was the first record I’ve ever bought. Not just the first Maiden album, but literally the first record I’ve ever bought. (The first cassette was Queen’s “Greatest Hits” in the same year. Yes, we still used tapes at that time. mp3 files were around twenty-five years in the future from those years.)

You could say that after that everything else is just history.

It’s not that simple, really.

Maiden’s music is that one special relationship that nobody else can ever replace or substitute. It’s the one big love that stays. It’s the one thing that will always pull you out of the water, no matter how deep you were drowning. And Iron Maiden have done all that for me more than once. Believe me.

When the events in my life became too much to handle and whenever I was willing to give up and when everything else failed, Maiden’s music was still there to pull me back and give me the strength to keep on going.

So here is my honest thank you and gratitude to the one band that had the greatest influence on my life.

Up the Irons!

“Run, live to fly, fly to live, do or die…” (Aces High)