No Prayer For The Dying Vs. The Final Frontier

[Kalata]

No Prayer is better, it has energy of 20 years younger band and the songs, while not their best work, are short and snappy which gives quite an advantage over bloated and tired TFF. In fact it seems to me that TFF was the first record when there was really nothing to prove anymore, the highpoint of the reunion era (2008) was over and they just made a record for the sake of it. Big big step down from the previous studio album. To conclude, while I have quite fond memories of the Final Frontier era, witnessing the band for the second time in 8.8.10 and then queueing to record shop a few nights later to get my first new studio album after becoming a fan (plus a free poster of the album cover for the first 100 people), its still my least favourite album. But to defend the album, Maiden at its worst is still better than probably 60-65% of any music ever released in the human history, so the bar is set quite (Aces) high.

The energy is great in NPFTD, TFF not that much compared with the next album, but you could also say that there were less things to prove after the brilliant run of 7 great albums. I think you're right about TFF (it is different with the next two), but they tried something different with it, so it wasn't Maiden by the numbers.