Powerman 5000 - New Wave album review

Industrial metal diehards hang on long after the party’s ended

Cover art for Powerman 5000 - New Wave 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.

Powerman 5000 are 26 years into a career that has seen them arrive at the release of this, their ninth album. Which makes their absolute inability to learn any new techniques, improve their songwriting or grow as songwriters or musicians in any way pretty astonishing. New Wave is yet another album of stomping, industrialised party metal, that at best is all a bit dated and trite, and at worst is desperately dunderheadedcack that makes Five Finger Death Punch sound like Devin Townsend. So SOFTWAREmark” gingersoftwareuiphraseguid=“5185b133-c70d-4f20-b86f-0d23fef68e76” id=“9f0e42be-114e-43be-ae47-354fbe58c9bb”>Cult Leader is dopey, but annoyingly catchy, while No White Flags is a po-faced ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place being sung by Jack Black on a Tenacious D album. Its biggest crime, though, is the woeful David Fucking Bowie, which may have been conceived as a tribute but will only succeed in making the late, great artist spin in his grave like a tombola. Go away now.

Stephen joined the Louder team as a co-host of the Metal Hammer Podcast in late 2021, eventually becoming a regular contributor to the magazine. He has since written hundreds of articles for Metal Hammer, Classic Rock and Louder, specialising in punk, hardcore and 90s metal. He also presents the Trve. Cvlt. Pop! podcast with Gaz Jones and makes regular appearances on the Bangers And Most podcast.