New Single - The Writing on the Wall

There is a little bit of Mother Russia, and a little bit of The Book of Souls on this track, while being a new direction for them.. Maiden have a way of sounding different yet very familiar at the same time.
 
I was thinking... Were Bruce and H inspired by Janick and Steve... This certainly seems like some kind of continuiation of TBOS, the song, both musically and thematically.
I remembered Bruce's speeches from TBOS tour about empires. Almost seems like that was the inspiration for the song.
 
Most people rating it quite above Speed of Light, which is quite impressive given that SoL is the second most accessed song of the reunion Era in Spotify.
To be fair, SoL being the 2nd most played song of the reunion on Spotify has a lot of factors involved. TBOS was the first album released with Spotify as the most popular streaming service, SoL was the first single on it released a month earlier and it was the first album after Bruce's cancer (I remember back then we were still a bit uncertain if Bruce would ever sing live again). I'm curious to see how TWOTW will perform, might update a thread I did here a year ago with the Spotify data for all Maiden songs. I don't think it's gonna be more played than SoL due to those reasons, but I expect a good response.
 
Also, a lot of fans might have gone from actually buying the records to using Spotify in the last 10 years... Or like me, buying the records but mainly listening on Spotify because it's convenient and I don't have to rip all my CD's. Come to think of it, I don't have access to a CD drive for my PC at the moment.
 
So I got this song on iTunes now. I just listened to it and then immediately played a tune (The Great Unknown) off of TBOS and the production on TWOTW is far better.
With this I can agree. It is the best sound they had since 7th son. Too bad because TBOS deserved a much better sound.
 
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Also, a lot of fans might have gone from actually buying the records to using Spotify in the last 10 years... Or like me, buying the records but mainly listening on Spotify because it's convenient and I don't have to rip all my CD's. Come to think of it, I don't have access to a CD drive for my PC at the moment.
Yeah, I remember TBOS' number of streams being way higher overall than any other albums, including most 80s ones (if you don't count the hits).
 
The funny thing is that I listened to TWOTW and The Legacy back to back and switched between them on studio monitors... And the production is strikingly similar. Almost the same. The Legacy is a bit drier. But very similar. Then I put on TBOS, the song. This is much better.

The only minus production wise... I would still like vocals a bit more up front... But anything else sounds great.
 
To be fair, SoL being the 2nd most played song of the reunion on Spotify has a lot of factors involved. TBOS was the first album released with Spotify as the most popular streaming service, SoL was the first single on it released a month earlier and it was the first album after Bruce's cancer (I remember back then we were still a bit uncertain if Bruce would ever sing live again). I'm curious to see how TWOTW will perform, might update a thread I did here a year ago with the Spotify data for all Maiden songs. I don't think it's gonna be more played than SoL due to those reasons, but I expect a good response.
Indeed, the timing of the release of TBOS coincides with the outbreak of Spotify if I'm not mistaken. A lot of people listened TBOS for the first time via this platform (just a correction btw, it's not the second, it's the third: 1. Wickerman, 2. Blood Brothers, 3. SoL)
 
The single clearly has Mother Russia+AMOLAD+The Book of Souls vibes. My main beef is, I get too much of AMOLAD. Give me more of TBOS. However, I agree that production is better than on TBOS.
 
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