In June 2025, Brit metallers The Last Bastion released their debut album ‘Who We Are’, a collection of songs driven by defiantly old school riffs. The songs may well have paid homage to the genre’s forefathers, and the material often sounded like something from the late 80s, but at its heart, the album had a lot of power. The ghosts of the slower, black album era Metallica cut through some of ‘Screaming In Silence’s heavier moments; a massive twin lead guitar creating a vital musical hook during ‘Medusa’ drew influence from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal but, when presented with a slower, heavier edge, also gave a nod to Slayer’s slow numbers, and that track’s featured solo showed how tight the band could be when delivering a raft of fretboard melting sounds. Perhaps most importantly, the huge crunch present during the slower parts of ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ suggested The Last Bastion would be a force of nature in a live setting.

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