Anvil's Impact Is Imminent is thunderous, goofy, and impishly diverse

Celluloid’s speed-metal kings Anvil keep ’em coming on 19th studio album Impact Is Imminent

Anvil: Impact Is Imminent cover art
(Image: © AFM)

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Only the meanest of spirits could begrudge Anvil the steady and highly productive career they’ve enjoyed since that film

What is particularly gratifying is to hear just how much the band are still enjoying themselves. Impact Is Imminent is their nineteenth studio album and it’s just as thunderous, goofy and impishly diverse as the best of its predecessors, with frontman Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow on particularly fine form, both as a guitarist and as one of the few men alive who could sing a song titled Teabag with something approximating a straight face. 

As ever, the highlights prove what an unashamedly ripping metal band Anvil can be: Ghost Shadow and Fire Rain are fiery, gas-guzzling hard-rock anthems, Shockwave is Anvil in grubby garage-doom mode and Wizard’s Wand is as silly and irresistible as its title suggests. 

That album title definitely belongs to Exodus, however.

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson began his inauspicious career as a music journalist in 1999. He wrote for Kerrang! for seven years, before moving to Metal Hammer and Prog Magazine in 2007. His primary interests are heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee, snooker and despair. He is politically homeless and has an excellent beard.