Defying the Rules

Defying the Rules, released by Germany's Remedy Records on 17 November 2004, is Hibria's debut album. It arrived eight years after the band formed in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, by way of two demos — Metal Heart in 1997 and Against the Faceless in 1999 — and a European tour of twenty-nine shows. After the short "Intro", "Steel Lord on Wheels" is the band's calling card. Fast chopped riffing, Iuri Sanson's piercing upper register, and song construction that refuses to fall back on simple repetition: the blueprint the next twenty years would work from is all there in the first four minutes. "Change Your Life Line" and "Living Under Ice" lead with speed, while "Millennium Quest", "The Faceless in Charge" and "Stare at Yourself" take six to nearly eight minutes to stack up shifting metres and key changes. "High Speed Breakout" and "The Faceless in Charge", both carried over from the demo years, were finally recorded properly here. Brazil already had Angra and Shaman by this point, but Hibria took neither the symphonic route nor the one that folds Brazilian music into metal. They behaved instead as direct descendants of German and American power and speed metal, and that plainness is much of why the record travelled. The Japanese edition came from Spiritual Beast in 2009 as SBCD1019, adding covers of Pantera's "Hard Ride" and Crimson Glory's "Painted Skies" as bonus tracks. King Records issued a tenth-anniversary edition (KICP-1718) in 2014 and a remastered reissue (KICP-4083) in 2024.