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.

Okay, forget about which bands these guys have been in previously, because it only distracts from the present. Because Wayward Sons is a fresh start for all of the members, and this album sounds… well, fresh!

This is simple, irresistible rock‘n’roll. There are nods to Thin Lizzy (Be Still), Bad Company (Give It Away) and Def Leppard (Killing Time), but it’s all done with such irrepressible momentum that what’s here transcends influences.

Toby Jepson is in fine voice, guitarist Sam Wood cracks out the vintage riffs, and the whole portrait is of a band making their own waves. The songs are well constructed, with the emphasis on giant choruses and propulsive rhythms, and in Small Talk and Something Wrong Wayward Sons have two of the best new songs you’ll hear in 2017.

There’s still room for manoeuvre and improvement, of course. Occasionally, as on Ghost, they stumble a little, but overall, Ghosts Of Yet To Come is an album with pedigree.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.