Trad metal had a pretty strong showing in 2019, with debuts from Idle Hands, Traveler, and Smoulder absolutely crushing, with others that I either haven't heard or didn't like much like Pulver, Riot City, and Iron Griffin generating a lot of buzz as well. Bubbling under the surface of all these heavy hitters has been a quaint little outfit from Bangalore, Kryptos. They've been plugging away for a long while now, existing in some form since 1998, and gaining some fame for being the first Indian band to play a full set at Wacken back in 2013, and they've been on my radar for a while thanks to my currently-shelved review series on countries overrepresented in population but underrepresented in metal. 21 years into their career, they've finally released their fifth album, Afterburner.
Yeah go ahead and place this firmly in the latter category up there. Maybe it's because Balls to the Wall and British Steel are basically forty years old at this point, but man I really find myself struggling to get excited for strict orthodoxy in that camp nowadays. Traveler is fast and mean, Smoulder is crushing and heavy, but Kryptos is just kinda... there. This is really basic Judas Priest or Accept style heavy metal with raspy vocals and a few bursts of speed here and there on tracks like "Crimson Queen". You'd think that having a vocalist that sounds so much like Mille Petrozza would up the thrash influence just by accident, but no, Afterburner is very mid paced and traditional, with riffs that would be all time classics if they weren't already perfected decades ago and rehashed by hundreds of similar bands in the meanwhile. I hope you like the "Restless and Wild" riff, because you're about to hear it no less than six dozen times here. At least Accept had the good sense to put "Fast as a Shark" on that album, ya know? Kryptos does do something kinda similar by opening with the title track, easily the most adrenaline fueled track on the record, but after that point it just kinda fills up with seven songs that might as well be titled "Not Afterburner".
If you like this sort of rigid rule-following, Afterburner isn't a bad album, and the bursts of speed on the title track and "Crimson Queen" are very welcome (even if the drummer can't seem to match the speed of the riffs if his life depended on it), but I can't in good faith recommend this since it's so bland and unexciting. I do recognize that Iron Maiden would still rule if they released Powerslave in 2019, but Afterburner is a clear imitation of the classics that came before it and doesn't really do anything to justify its own existence alongside said classics.
RATING: 40%
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