25 Years Of Nuclear Blast

2012, not only the year of the predicted doomsday but also NUCLEAR BLAST’s 25th anniversary year, was rung in by the good news of more gold awards for NIGHTWISH’s opus “Imaginaerum” – Germany, Switzerland and Slovakia invested the monumental record with its well-deserved noble metal plating.

As the first release of 2012, legendary US hardcore combo BIOHAZARD revealed its long-awaited first studio album in the original line up for about two and a half decades on the 20th of January and won high praise by the international music press for the musical steam hammer entitled “Reborn In Defiance”. The same can be said about the Finnish newcomer sextet BATTLE BEAST: After their glorious victory at the W:O:A Metal Battle in 2010, the heavy metal youngsters came up trumps with a true-bred steel record in finest NWoBHM manner, which got them into an optimal starting position for their upcoming European tour as support of their label mates NIGHTWISH.

February was started off by Swiss new wave of folk metal giants ELUVEITE with their new album “Helvetios”. A flawless record that justifiably sent the international press into rapture and united all of the octet’s style-defining elements in the form of 17 incomparably energetic and emotionally charged folk anthems under one umbrella. Moreover, on the same day, namely on the 10th of February, the Tasmanian devils of PSYCROPTIC testified their breathtakingly grooving technical death metal might with their fifth studio album that strengthened the exceptional status of the brutal juggernaut from down under within the genre once again. “Surprisingly harsh” is also a good keyword for album number 21 – fittingly entitled “21” – of the traditionalistic trio RAGE. Band leader Peavy and his men created by far the hardest and most brutal album of their entire career, without denying their downright legendary sense of catchy choruses and long runner melodies at any point. A blockbuster through and through!

The second single “The Crow, The Owl And The Dove“, taken from NIGHTWISH’s masterpiece “Imaginaerum”, opened an almost summery March. Dutch symphonic metal icons EPICA followed up, whose “Requiem For The Indifferent” doubtlessly offered an unforgettable experience, as guitarist Mark Jansen had promised beforehand. In the middle of the month, the 8th part of the mother of all clip collections sent all lovers of metallic music videos into rapture – as a bulging 2DVD+BluRay package, “Monsters of Metal 8” offered about seven hours of the finest audiovisual food from every imaginable subgenre of metal. Compliant with the album title, Swedish tech-thrash originators MESHUGGAH served us with a true “Koloss” full of tricky high-end killer compositions. Shortly after that, dyed-in-the-wool traditional thrash metallers OVERKILL proclaimed the “Electric Age” and thereby energized the whole scene!


When Teutonic metal legends ACCEPT deliver a new work, the joy is empirically intense. It went sky high when it came to light in the beginning of April that last year’s album of the year and comeback masterpiece “Blood Of The Nations” got a coequal successor. The highly celebrated stroke of genius “Stalingrad” even exceeded its predecessor in some respects and secured itself the pole position for the title “album of the year 2012” in the blink of an eye! Iconic punk thrashers MUNICIPAL WASTE could confidently be sent to space…to be up to tremendously entertaining mischief there which they shared with us on their new output “The Fatal Feast (Waste In Space)”. At the same time, NIGHTWISH’s golden opus magnum “Imaginaerum” was released as a noble tour edition over the course of their current world tour. The eleventh studio album of Swedish dyed-in-the-wool death metallers UNLEASHED turned out a great deal darker – on “Odalheim”, a high-class post-apocalyptic image based on the Norse mythology was painted with the pitch-black paintbrush of doom. Shortly before the end of the month, the melodic death metal sector offered the first BEFORE THE DAWN album after the departure of Lars Eikind and Atte Palokangas. Even without the characteristic clean vocals of Lars, “Rise Of The Phoenix” was able to enthral critics across-the-board and to rake in rave reviews all about because of its hymnic and gloomy brutality!

The merry month of May didn’t only bring us the first summery days of 2012 but also let the sun shine from the speakers of our stereo systems with a Scandinavian triple pack release in a class of its own! The Finns of SONATA ARCTICA combined only the best of their early works’ catchiness with the experimental approaches of their younger releases, which resulted in their most eclectic work to date, entitled “Stones Grow Her Name”. Not more than a week later, the Swedes struck back with a spot-on double hit: On “Carolus Rex”, epic power metallers SABATON rekindled the Swedish Empire in a bombastic firework of hits and could rightfully be crowned as the true-born rulers of their genre at least since then. With less bombast but all the more traditional heavy metal riffing, GRAND MAGUS celebrated their highly acclaimed Nuclear Blast debut and gave proof of their impressive compositional skills on ”The Hunt” once more.