Kryptonite - Kryptonite album review

The best Melodic Rock you can get this month

Cover art for Kryptonite - Kryptonite album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Let’s get the disclaimer out of the way: Kryptonite are yet another of those ‘projects’ assembled by a record company. In these impoverished days it’s becoming a financial necessity for musicians to be in more than one band at a time and when Jakob Samuel, voice of The Poodles, met Alessandro Del Vecchio, in-house producer at Frontiers Records and a writer for the likes of Neal Schon, Fergie Frederiksen, Steve Lukather and many more, the result was inevitable.

Though the results of such collaborations can be iffy, Kryptonite – also featuring guitarist Michael Palace, bassist Pontus Egberg and drummer Robban Bäck – are striking: as glacial and imposing as their namesake alien mineral.

Best exemplified by Chasing Fire, Across The Water and Get Out Be Gone, the music is slick and hook-laden, fusing the clean, modern-sounding sensibilities of today’s Scandi-AOR acts with the timelessness of 1987-era Whitesnake.

Whether or not Kryptonite will get to make a second record remains to be seen. On the evidence of this debut, though, such a prospect would be very welcome.

Dave Ling

Dave Ling was a co-founder of Classic Rock magazine. His words have appeared in a variety of music publications, including RAW, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Prog, Rock Candy, Fireworks and Sounds. Dave’s life was shaped in 1974 through the purchase of a copy of Sweet’s album ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, along with early gig experiences from Status Quo, Rush, Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Yes and Queen. As a lifelong season ticket holder of Crystal Palace FC, he is completely incapable of uttering the word ‘Br***ton’.