Legacy of the Dark Lands

Legacy of the Dark Lands came out on Nuclear Blast on 8 November 2019, billed to Blind Guardian Twilight Orchestra, as the two-disc digipak NB 4693-0; Ward Records issued it in Japan on 22 November, on two discs (GQCS-90803/4) and on one (GQCS-90805). It had been announced in March 2019 for 1 November and moved a week. The band lists it in its own discography, but it is not counted among the numbered studio albums: Victor calls the next one, The God Machine, the eleventh. It is the orchestral project Hansi Kürsch and André Olbrich had been working on for more than twenty years, and Kürsch counts it the most important album of his career. The story was made with the German author Markus Heitz as a direct sequel to his best-selling novel Die dunklen Lande, set in the Thirty Years' War; the novel, published on 1 March 2019 and set in 1629, holds the album's prequel. The music was recorded with the Prague FILMharmonic Orchestra in the Rudolfinum, and there is not a single electric guitar on it. The album proper runs twenty-four tracks, twelve songs and twelve narrations and interludes, and the second disc holds instrumental versions of the twelve songs. Metal Hammer in Germany reported that some of the narrators from Nightfall in Middle-Earth were brought back. "Point of No Return" came first, with a lyric video on 6 September 2019, followed by "This Storm", and the video for "War Feeds War" was released on the day the album came out. Kürsch later said that finishing it was a complete relief after it had sat on the band's shoulders for twenty-five years. The player on this page plays the twenty-four tracks of the album followed by the twelve instrumentals. The running order here is the original's as printed.