Fictional Album Art
- Thread starter Azas
- Start date
Azas
Summer's End
Bruce Dickinson – A Song Against the Dying Sky
(Out 2027, Parlophone)
Somewhere in the wreckage of The Mandrake Project—that well-intentioned yet patchwork contraption stitched together from riffs lost in the attic since the mid-2000s—there was a heart. It just wasn’t beating very loudly. The songs shuffled along, Frankenstein’s monster with one boot nailed to the floor, and Bruce—God bless him—sang his lungs out to keep it alive. But it felt like exhumation rather than resurrection. The promised firestorm of his return ended up being a candle sputtering in the wind.
Now, in 2027, he brings us A Song Against the Dying Sky. And here’s the Camus punchline: it’s alive. Really alive.
This is the first Dickinson solo record without Roy Z since the Clinton administration. Depending on who you ask, that split was either a quiet fizzling-out or a borderline Shakespearean falling-out over control, royalties, and the eternal argument of whether every song needs a flamenco section. Whatever the case, Bruce turned instead to his current live band: Tanya O’Callaghan (bass), Chris Declercq (guitar), Philip Naslund (guitar/keys), Dave Moreno (drums), and Maestro Mistheria (keys/orchestration). The chemistry is undeniable. Rather than pasting riffs together like mismatched Lego bricks, they locked themselves into a room, hit record, and played. Live, in the studio.
At first, fans panicked. After all, Iron Maiden have been recording “live in the studio” ever since the 1999 reunion, and while that method captures energy, it’s also given us albums that many listeners find murky, cluttered, even muddy in the mix. But here, the rawness works. It’s dangerous, it breathes, it feels like the floor might collapse at any moment. And Bruce thrives in that chaos.
Musically, the record sits at an unlikely intersection: the industrial melancholy of Skunkworks welded to the gothic grandeur of Accident of Birth. You hear echoes of “Back From the Edge” in opener “Thornbeak”—a razor-wound riff in D standard, chugging on the low strings while Tanya’s bass snakes between syncopated accents. Bruce attacks the chorus with a howl that sounds less like a 68-year-old man and more like a prophet warning you the sky really is falling.
“The Briar and the Blade” stretches past seven minutes, shifting between modal riffs in Phrygian dominant and eerie, almost folky arpeggios. The twin guitars grind against each other like tectonic plates, until the bridge cracks open into a galloping 6/8. It’s both medieval and apocalyptic. You can almost smell the mud and hear the torches hissing in the rain.
“Elegy in Red” is the bruised heart of the album. A mid-tempo lament carried on a minor-key riff that circles like a vulture, it’s built on Chris Declercq’s open-string pedal tones in drop D, giving the song a hypnotic, inexorable drive. Tanya’s bass moves like a slow tide beneath it, anchoring Bruce as he delivers a performance both anguished and oddly restrained—almost whispered in the verses, exploding in the choruses like someone finally breaking under the weight of silence. The arrangement is deceptively simple, but every measure drips with inevitability. Think Accident of Birth’s “Omega” distilled into something even leaner and sharper.
Then there’s “The Last Sun of Autumn”—a two-minute-and-change ballad played nearly naked. Just acoustic guitar, a minor key progression dripping with melancholy, and Bruce’s voice, exposed and mortal. It recalls “Arc of Space” in its fragility, but here there’s no cosmic hope, just the quiet knowledge that the light will go out, and you will too. Somehow, that’s beautiful.
The title track, “A Song Against the Dying Sky,” is the record’s spine. It’s Bruce at his most Stoic: defiance against entropy, fists raised against inevitability. The riff is built on a Mixolydian groove, bright and tense, with Mistheria’s keyboards shimmering like stained glass in the background. The chorus—“I will not go quietly into your long night”—will rip the roof off festival fields next summer.
“Twilight Crown” is a short, sharp dagger of a song. At just under four minutes, it barrels forward on a palm-muted gallop riff that could’ve lived on Skunkworks if it had more venom in the teeth. Dave Moreno drives it like a man trying to outrun the end credits, his snare cracks locked to sixteenth-note hi-hats that give it an anxious, breathless pulse. The chorus riff dips into harmonic minor with a sneer, and Bruce sings it less like a hymn and more like a curse spat at the heavens. If “Thornbeak” was the calling card, “Twilight Crown” is the bloody signature at the bottom.
“Ashes Rise” stretches out into near-epic territory, clocking in at almost seven minutes, and it earns every second. Built on an ascending chord progression that feels like climbing a burning staircase, the song layers Mistheria’s cathedral organ tones over twin guitars that weave in and out of each other in counterpoint. The bridge is the standout: the band drops to a whisper, Tanya’s bass playing high-register harmonics while Bruce half-speaks a verse about resurrection and futility, before everything detonates into a final chorus. It’s the kind of track that feels like it should close the album, but here it works as a penultimate harbinger of the apocalypse still to come in “The Long Midnight.”
On comparisons to Skunkworks and Accident of Birth:
And then there’s “This Burning Light.” A modern banger in every sense: downpicked staccato riffing that wouldn’t be out of place on a Gojira record, syncopated kicks from Moreno, and Bruce soaring over it all with operatic defiance. It’s the heaviest he’s sounded since The Chemical Wedding maybe heavier.
Closer “The Long Midnight” is the masterpiece. Eleven minutes, and not a second wasted. It begins with slow, doomy harmonics, guitars tuned down to C# minor, blooming into a riff that trudges like a funeral procession. Halfway through, the band veers off into prog territory—odd time signatures, keyboards swelling like cathedral organs, O’Callaghan laying down a bassline that rattles your ribcage. Then, in its final act, Bruce rips into one of his most anguished performances ever, as if trying to out-scream the void itself. The song collapses into silence like a dying star. Curtain down.
Lyrically, the record obsesses over the only enemy anyone ever has: time. There are dashes of occult imagery—resurrections that never take, crowns of twilight, thorned birds pecking at mortality—but always the message is clear: the fight matters, not the outcome. Nurture the flame inside, because it’s all you’ve got. It’s stoicism with teeth.
Surprise, surprise: Bruce Dickinson has delivered the album fans have wanted for decades, but never quite expected. A record of crushing bangers, bleak epics, and desperate hymns, alive with urgency and mortality. It feels like the work of a man staring down the dying sky—and singing loud enough to scare it back for another day.
9/10
Because no album is perfect. But this one comes close.
Last edited: