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It’s difficult not to like Rob Halford, the prima donna-voiced frontman of Birmingham metal stalwarts Judas Priest. One of the few openly gay figures in heavy music, Halford has long been coaxing generations of misanthropic straight men into head-to-toe leather as a sign of their virility, while bringing Queen-style operatics to songs laden with devil’s-trident riffs and double-bass drum. A year before coming out in 1998, he performed ‘Breaking The Law’, Priest’s most famous song, with queercore band Pansy Division. In a 2020 interview he approved of the track being played over stolen NYPD radios by George Floyd protestors.
What of Invincible Shield, the group’s first studio album in six years? Perhaps its most striking feature to anyone not versed in their back catalogue is the political slant of several tracks, including opener ‘Panic Attack’. A longtime US resident, Halford has previously described the social messaging of his lyrics as ‘concealed by smoke and mirrors.’ But the smoke is pretty thin around lines like ‘the clamour and the clatter of incensed keys / can bring a nation to its knees / on the wings of a lethal icon, bird of prey / it’s a sign of the times when bedlam rules / when the masses condone pompous fools.’ - THE LIST
Tracklist
1 Panic Attack
2 The Serpent and the King
3 Invincible Shield
4 Devil in Disguise
5 Gates of Hell
6 Crown of Horns
7 As God is my Witness
8 Trial By Fire
9 Escape From Reality
10 Sons of Thunder
11 Giants in the Sky