IRON SAVIOR TRIVIA
Trivia
On the last day of the Megatropolis drum sessions the band went looking for something that could become the Japanese bonus track. What they settled on was the "Iron Watcher Medley" — and because the decision was so spontaneous there were no cue tracks for Thomas Nack to orient himself by. Piet picked up an acoustic guitar and played some of the riffs instead, leaving Thomas to record with nothing but a click. A track made for the Japanese edition alone closed out the day.
Iron Savior first appeared on a Japanese stage as a surprise rather than as a booking. On 17 March 2006, Sielck's other band Savage Circus was playing two consecutive nights at the Ebisu Liquid Room in Tokyo, opening for Edguy. On the second night of those "Melodic Power Metal Nights", the players spontaneously came back on after the Savage Circus set and kicked into an "Iron Savior / Watcher In The Sky" medley and "Condition Red". The official site reports that the surprised crowd received it enthusiastically.
Their own headline debut in Japan came ten years later. On 2 April 2016 Sielck posted on the official site that the savior was about to land in Tokyo for the first time ever, announcing a show on 12 July 2016. The venue was Tsutaya O-West in Shibuya, and he added that he was looking forward to it very much indeed.
An early greeting from Sielck on the official site captures the halfway point between project and band. He wrote that what had started as a venture with Kai and Thomen had taken on the character of a band during production, because the musical and personal chemistry simply worked. The feeling grew stronger after their first live show at Wacken, and with Jan Eckert found on bass it was hard to call it a project any more. He added his own caveat, though: by definition it was still a project, since Kai and Thomen had Gamma Ray and Blind Guardian as their "first" bands.
A band summary posted on the official site in 2014 puts the origins into a single paragraph. Iron Savior began in 1996 with Piet Sielck, Kai Hansen of Gamma Ray and Thomen Stauch of Blind Guardian, at first as nothing more than a studio project. The musical direction was clear from the start: traditional power metal shaped by NWOBHM giants such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, tied to science-fiction concepts in the lyrics. Since Hansen left in 2001, Sielck has been the only one of the three founders still aboard.
Iron Savior's lyrical world is written out as a single continuous story on the band's own site. Its setting is a bold rereading of Plato's Atlantis. The official text opens by asking a series of what-ifs: what if Plato's timeframe was wrong, what if Atlantis sank not ten thousand but three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and what if it was destroyed not by a natural disaster but by thermonuclear war. Everything the later albums narrate is built on those premises.
Skycrest was very nearly released under a different name. Sielck says the working title was "Hellbreaker", chosen out of respect for bassist Jan, who was fighting cancer at the time. Then, looking at the cover design late one night, he felt it was not quite right and settled on Skycrest instead. He is glad he changed it: nothing, he says, could have suited that artwork and that title better. "Hellbreaker" survives on the album as a song title.
The backing choirs on Firestar include Piet Sielck's seventeen-year-old daughter Frida and her boyfriend. AFM's press material lists them alongside the powerful Powerhouse Studio production and its intelligently placed keyboard parts as the touches that finished the record off.
In 2015 Sielck made an unusually frank confession about Megatropolis. AFM had told him the CDs were sold out, which opened the way to a re-release — and for him, a chance to correct mistakes he had been unhappy about for a long time. He was specific about what they were. At the time he had deliberately left out Iron Savior hallmarks such as big choir backings and multi-timbral vocals, in order to make the album more distinguishable from his other band, Savage Circus. He calls that a fatal error, and one he was finally able to put right.
The Reforged re-recording project grew out of turning a rights problem to advantage. As AFM Records put it, the band faced a situation where its early albums had long been unavailable in the shops but could not simply be reissued for legal reasons. In Sielck's words, they cannot re-release their Noise Records-era works in their original form, but they are free to re-record the songs from them. So they used the situation to give the material a sonic upgrade.
The band's first live album and DVD was recorded at the Knust in Hamburg on 10 January 2015. What Sielck stressed in the announcement was that it was happening in front of a home crowd — and that he wanted the crowd to help. Turn up in numbers, bring everyone you know, and bring your smartphones, because you are supposed to be filming too. After the show they would announce where to upload the footage, and it would be cut into the material from the professional cameras, so the fans' own recordings would be immortalised as well.
Asked what advice he would give young musicians, Sielck boils it down to one word: be unique. Learning from the heroes you love is fine at the start, he says, but what matters is chasing your own style and your own sound — however well you play, sounding like an imitation of someone else is not enough. He adds that if he and Kai Hansen had gone on simply doing Judas Priest and Iron Maiden impressions in their youth, there would be no Helloween, no Gamma Ray and no Iron Savior today.
Iron Savior did not begin as an attempt to form a band. It began with a single song Piet Sielck wrote to test himself. Years of work as a recording engineer had left him with the impression that the signed bands coming through his room were not necessarily better than he was, so he decided to try writing something of his own. The trial piece was a song called "Iron Savior", worked up exactly the way he would have worked up a client's track. Friends reacted well to it, and only then did he commit to making a full album. The band carries the name of that first song.
Sielck says he was twelve when Gentry, the school band he shared with Kai Hansen, played its very first show. It was a local band contest, and since they had no drummer and were not happy with their own voices, they borrowed both from another band at their school. They won — although Sielck is candid that the playing was not the reason. They had brought a crowd of friends, his mother had supplied more crisps than anyone could eat, and the friends started trading votes for them.
The first complete song written for The Landing was "Heavy Metal Never Dies". Sielck says that if you set its lyrics beside what had just happened with Dockyard 1, you can call it musical therapy for him. In the same interview he notes that Condition Red was written under similar circumstances — after coming through a personal crisis, he went into it with a good attitude. Writing "Heavy Metal Never Dies" fired him up so badly, he says, that he was almost sad when the writing sessions ended.
"Back From The Fires Of Hell", released in 2026, is the companion piece to "Through The Fires Of Hell" from Firestar. Sielck says he wrote the first lyrics for it before he received his cancer diagnosis, and that what he had written as poetry then turned into bitter reality — though in a different way from the one he had imagined. He describes the pair like this: the earlier song is closer to poetry dedicated to his wife, while the later one is closer to a reflection on what actually happened.
The sound of Iron Savior has long rested on Powerhouse Studio, Piet Sielck's own room in Hamburg. He normally produces, mixes and masters everything there himself, and the 2026 album Deathbringer was made the same way. The press material describes the studio as a well-established name in powerful metal productions and a place inseparably bound up with the Iron Savior sound.
On Reforged: Ironbound (Vol. 2), the second instalment of the re-recording series, Kai Hansen took the lead vocal on "Solar Wings" once again. He had sung the original version when the song appeared on Dark Assault in 2001 — the album after which he left the band to concentrate on Gamma Ray. Sielck said what he had enjoyed most about the reunion was getting to play the original parts again not only with Jan and Piesel but with Kai as well.
The same album, Reforged: Ironbound (Vol. 2), carries a guest solo by Kai Hansen's son Tim — whose godfather, Sielck notes, is Sielck himself. Taken together, he described the record as something like a family album spanning several generations.
The 2026 covers album Awesome Anthems Of The Galaxy grew out of a single track from more than twenty years earlier. Sielck says that after their cover of Seal's "Crazy" — a bonus track on 2002's Condition Red — was used in an HBO television show and became a considerable success, fans and media asked them almost constantly to make a full album of cover versions. Two decades later, in his words, here it finally is.
The Mando Diao cover "Dance With Somebody" on Rise of the Hero came about by accident. Sielck had always rather liked the song and the singer's voice, which stood out pleasantly for him from the uniform radio top-forty. In October, shortly before the drum sessions, it came on at the birthday party of Jan's partner, and everyone present thought the same thing: nice song, but we could do it better. It was originally meant only as a Japanese bonus track, but as the "Iron-Saviorisation" progressed it kept getting cooler and their grins kept getting wider, so in the end they put it on the main album.
In July 2023 Piet Sielck made public that he had been diagnosed with cancer. His statement opens by noting that after Jan — Jan-S. Eckert — had been diagnosed, it was now his turn. It had fortunately been caught at a stage where a cure was possible, so treatment had to start immediately: chemotherapy first, then surgery after a period of recovery. He wrote that he had a top-notch medical team and a great network of support, was in reasonable shape with no other illnesses, and had the mental strength and will to come through the rough ride. The band cancelled all its remaining shows for 2023.
There was a backstory to that 2006 visit. According to the band's Japanese label, Marquee/Avalon, Thomen Stauch cancelled the Japanese dates for health reasons shortly before the Savage Circus shows, and Thomas Nack played in his place. Yenz Leonhardt was on bass, and J. "Piesel" Küstner had come along as crew. In other words the Iron Savior line-up of the day was already in Tokyo — which is what made the surprise encore appearance possible.
Marquee/Avalon record the 2016 visit as an event that delighted fans who had waited years for this strand of German metal. In the label's account, the band pressed ahead with its first proper Japanese tour that year even after the long-serving Thomas Nack had stepped away, bringing in a stand-in to make it happen.
In Japan, Iron Savior were first introduced by Victor Entertainment. The company's discography lists the releases under the Noise International imprint, and its Japanese edition of the debut album Iron Savior runs to thirteen tracks, closing with "This Flight Tonight" and "The Rage (demo version)". The same album was reissued at a lower price on 23 July 2008.
The Japanese edition makes the structure of the 1999 EP Interlude easy to read. Victor Entertainment's release page gives a Japanese date of 25 August 1999 and the catalogue number VICP-60820. Of its ten tracks the first five are live takes — "Iron Savior", "Brave New World", "Watcher In The Sky", "Riding On Fire" and "For The World" — and the remaining five are studio recordings: "Contortions Of Time", "Touching The Rainbow", "Stonecold", "The Hatchet Of War" and "Desert Plains".
The Japanese edition of the third album, Dark Assault, appeared ahead of the rest of the world, released by Victor Entertainment on 24 January 2001 as VICP-61248. It runs to fourteen tracks, with "Delivering The Goods", "Headhunter" and "The Hellion / Electric Eye" following the regular material. Victor's own description introduces the record as the third full-length by Iron Savior, the band led by Piet Sielck, who also works as a producer and engineer.
From Megatropolis in 2007 onwards, the Japanese editions have come out on Marquee/Avalon — and almost without exception they carry bonus tracks. The label's own listing shows Megatropolis (21 June 2007, MICP-10666) with one, The Landing (14 December 2011, MICP-11028) with one, Rise of the Hero (19 February 2014, MICP-11139) with two, Titancraft (25 May 2016, MICP-11291) with one and Skycrest (2 December 2020, MICP-11589) with one.
The Japanese bonus track on Rise of the Hero was "Mind Over Matter 2014", a re-recording of a song from 2001's Dark Assault. The track listing posted on the official site marks the thirteenth track, "I've Been To Hell 2014", as the limited-edition extra and the fourteenth, "Mind Over Matter 2014", as the Japanese one.
Of "Wingmen", the Japanese bonus track on Skycrest, Sielck said in his track-by-track that it is about supporting one another. Even the song that appears only on the Japanese edition had its place in the account he gave of the album.
The Japanese edition of Firestar was released by Avalon on 4 October 2023 with the catalogue number MICP-11822. It carries two bonus tracks: "When The Tanks Are Rolling" as track ten and "Heading Out To The Highway" as track thirteen. The line-up given on the Japanese release page is Piet Sielck on vocals, Joachim Küstner on guitars, Jan-S. Eckert on bass and Patrick Klose on drums.
The Japanese release of Kill or Get Killed came in a two-disc special edition, MICP-90112. According to Avalon's listing, its bonus disc holds seven tracks: covers of AC/DC's "Sin City" and Bryan Adams' "Run To You", re-recordings titled "Cyberhero 2.0" and "Farewell And Goodbye 2.0", a radio edit and a karaoke version of the title track, and "Overkill".
In an interview at the end of 2020 Sielck mentioned Japanese fans twice. Having noted that metal is popular in Russia and that regular touring there since 2012 had built them a solid fan base, he said he hoped to do the same in Japan. In his closing message he regretted not having been able to come over and celebrate with everyone that year, and said the band had not given up on meeting again.
The details of that first headline show survive in the announcement from Disk Union, which sold the tickets. The concert took place on Tuesday 12 July 2016 at Tsutaya O-West in Tokyo, doors at 18:00 and start at 19:00. Advance tickets were 7,500 yen including tax, standing, with the compulsory drink charge extra, and general sale opened on 30 April that year. The store described it as the band's first headline visit to Japan, arriving roughly twenty years after their debut.
Firestar reached Japan first. BURRN! ONLINE gives 4 October 2023 for the Japanese edition against 6 October abroad. The magazine also spells out the two Japanese bonus tracks, noting that "Heading Out To The Highway" is a Judas Priest cover, and places the album as the band's twelfth overall, their first original album in about three years since Skycrest in 2020, following the second re-recorded compilation Reforged: Ironbound in 2022.
A December 1997 update on the official site records where Sielck was at the time: down in Krefeld, Germany, working with Blind Guardian's André Olbrich on the guitar parts for that band's new record, which was due the following April.
In September 2011 Sielck announced a line-up change by posting straight onto the band's own forum. Yenz Leonhardt was leaving, having become too busy with his other commitments, and the replacement was Jan-S. Eckert. Sielck wrote that he, Piesel and Thomas could not think of a better solution. With that return, the band was back to the line-up that had made Condition Red.
In January 2017 Sielck used the official site to announce Thomas Nack's departure. Nack had used his time out well and had concluded for himself that he would not be returning to the Iron Savior drum stool. Sielck wrote that losing a long-standing member hurt but that the decision was accepted, and that he was glad Thomas had found a path he was happy with. The replacement was Patrick Klose, who had already been deputising for several months; making him a permanent member was the natural step.
Patrick Klose's own post about joining carried a note of thanks to the man he replaced. Every show since September had been amazing, he wrote, but this was overwhelming; he thanked his bandmates and Sören Teckenburg, and then Thomas, from whose drumming on the third and fourth albums he had learned a great deal. He had just come out of rehearsal for the next night's show at the Kubana in Siegburg.
In the story, the Iron Savior that gives the band its name is a vast defence station built in the planet's orbit. In the official account, the High Council of Atlantis commissioned a large-scale defence project against the Alliance, and it took fifty years to build. What set the machine apart was that alongside the CPU running its navigation it carried an organic component, the so-called bio-unit. The CPU would handle routine navigation while the bio-unit took the ethical and moral decisions — and in the end the bio-unit was meant to be the machine's true master.
The story turns on one engineer. Randor CulDranoc was the brilliant mind at the centre of the project, and he wrote every navigation programme installed in the giant. He volunteered his own brain to be wired directly into the machine, but the Council refused, judging him biased. The defeat broke him; after a deep depression he was removed from the project. When the Iron Savior was launched, he betrayed his own people and handed the construction plans to the Alliance.
The fall of Atlantis begins, ironically, with a small programming mistake. A secret routine CulDranoc had written let the Alliance take the machine, and the Atlantean fleet was destroyed along with its moon base. A suicide mission wrested the giant back out of Alliance control, but the routine could not be deactivated, so Atlantis chose to send the machine off across the galaxy rather than destroy it. A small but fatal error in the course the commando programmed turned a journey of three hundred and fifty years into one of three hundred and fifty thousand.
The return comes in the year 2106. A structure nine miles in radius enters Earth's orbit, transmits messages in an incomprehensible language and then opens fire. Over the three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-year voyage the bio-unit had drifted into dormancy, leaving only the CPU in control. The CPU was still following its old prime directive — protect Atlantis, force the Alliance into submission — but since Atlantis no longer existed it fell into a fatal misreading, concluding that Atlantis had been destroyed and the Alliance now ruled the planet. The offensive follows from that misunderstanding.
The story does not end there. In the official account the CPU had developed a form of intelligence of its own during the long voyage, and after endless silent dialogues with the bio-unit it circumvented and deleted the old Atlantean directives by its own free will. Recognising its error, the Iron Savior returned to Earth — and this time, instead of attacking the Terraneans, it opened fire on the Shadow fleet that had broken in from another universe. It is the moment the machine acts on judgement rather than on orders.
In the year 2197 a second giant vessel enters the story: the Protector. Behind it stands Randor CulDranoc, the designer of the Iron Savior. Having fled into space just before the nuclear catastrophe, he settled on a distant planet, built another machine with his followers and this time melted into it himself, with no council to take his life's work away. The heavy radiation he absorbed just before his escape had altered his genetic code and given him mental control over most forms of life — but not over the Terranean descendants of Atlantis, who had been exposed to the same radiation and were immune. That blind spot proves his undoing.
The published story runs as far as the year 2356 and the Andromeda nebula. The Federation develops a trans-dimensional drive, and its flagship Thunderbird becomes the first ship from this side of the Milky Way to reach Andromeda. There the crew hears of a region local peoples have avoided since ancient times — the Realm of Steel — and of the world of machines at its heart, Machine World. Its builders had made machines to fight their wars, a weapon those machines developed killed everything living, and the machines survived for millions of years following the only orders they had left: survive and evolve. The story closes with the Federation dispatching a fleet led by the Iron Savior, on the reasoning that the best negotiator with an intelligent machine is an intelligent machine — and with the words "to be continued".
The tenth album, Kill or Get Killed, is darker in both artwork and lyrics than the earlier concept records, and Sielck has explained why. He simply fancied doing something new, and drew on a science-fiction novel about the extinction of mankind at the hands of an alien civilisation — Der Stern der Pandora, the German edition of Pandora's Star. Asked to sum the album up in a sentence, he answered with north-German understatement: they had felt like it, and they had made an effort.
The lyric of "Our Time Has Come", the first single from Skycrest, belongs to the Iron Savior saga: Sielck says it depicts the situation just before the fall of Atlantis. His lyrics always rest on life, he explains, or at least on his own view of the world even when the setting is fiction — and he leaves it to the listener to take the song as a metaphor for something or simply as fantasy.
In the same interview Sielck went through Skycrest song by song. "Skycrest" is about the sheer scale and power of the Iron Savior vessel itself; "Souleater" is about facing grief and destroying whatever eats away at the soul; "There Can Be Only One" is built on the first Highlander film; "Silver Bullet" is a werewolf tale; "Raise The Flag" is about love of metal; "End Of The Rainbow" is about growing older, coping with change and choosing where to go; and "Ode To The Brave" is a song for every hero, sword and blade out there.
"Ease Your Pain", the ballad on Skycrest, was written and sung by bassist Jan-S. Eckert. Sielck says Jan wrote it to express his own cancer and what it brought with it, and reckons the pain Jan's partner felt must have been harder to bear than his own despair. Sielck calls it a deeply personal but bold song, and the best Iron Savior ballad since "Forevermore" on Unification.
The third single from Skycrest, "Raise The Flag", was shot as a car video — but without drummer Patrick Klose. The filming was in Hamburg and he lives in Essen, five hundred kilometres away, which the travel restrictions of the time made impossible. So the band put a photograph of him on an iPad and took that along in the car instead. Sielck notes that they had made a video on the same concept for the previous album and did another because so many fans had asked for one.
The video for "Way Of The Blade", from Titancraft, was filmed in a Cold War command bunker called "Erich" in Erndtebrück. The shoot report by director Rainer "Zipp" Fränzen records a constant five degrees Celsius, not a scrap of daylight and a packed schedule of more than sixteen hours, all on a weekend. The song title had led him to picture a castle or a fortress; the band saw it quite differently. Rather than attempt heroic knights and nasty monsters in earnest, they chose a location with a faintly futuristic character to match both the cover art and the band's fondness for science fiction — the aim being to combine hard-edged heroism with a truckload of sarcasm and self-irony.
The same report notes that the bunker is a regular fixture for metal videos. Its owner, Ralf Pasbach, again gave the crew a great deal of freedom and looked after them well; the same team had already shot Mastermind's "Keep Your Dreams Alive", Brainstorm's "Firesoul" and Sinbreed's "Bleed" there. It is a nuclear shelter from the 1960s where soldiers once watched the skies over Europe and where decisions over countless lives could have been taken. The director writes that he likes the fact a place with such a dark past can now serve as a backdrop for something positive.
The title of the band's first live release, Live At The Final Frontier, came from Felipe Machado Franco, who also drew the artwork. In a post written the day he delivered the final mix, Sielck said Felipe had not only produced a killer sleeve but had come up with the perfect title as well. He knew perfectly well that Iron Maiden have an album called The Final Frontier — but they had been doing this science-fiction thing for so long that the title was a must, and looking at the artwork he could not think of anything that fitted better.
The drum tracks for Megatropolis were cut at Karo Studio near Hamburg between 5 and 8 February 2007. The studio report on the official site notes that until a few days beforehand it had not even been settled where the drums would be recorded. Karo has hosted Hammerfall, Freedom Call, Blind Guardian, Grave Digger, Saxon and Motörhead among others, and Iron Savior had already worked there many times. The rough cue tracks that the drum sessions were built on had been recorded in advance at Powerhouse Studio.
For those sessions Thomas Nack played an entirely new kit, a Pearl Masters Custom in Midnight Fade. The report describes the resulting sound as straighter than on previous albums, with a cutting edge and short decay after the stroke — achieved partly with adhesive tape on the resonant heads of the toms, which lent the drums a more modern feel.
There is a reason Megatropolis sounds darker overall. In the second part of the official studio report, bassist Yenz Leonhardt explains that the bass and guitars are all tuned three semitones lower, which pushes the whole album towards a gloomier sound. Before recording could start, the saddle and bridge of the bass had to be adjusted considerably to cope with that lower tuning and the heavier strings.
The bass Yenz Leonhardt played on those sessions was a Warwick Buzzard JE Ltd., the signature model designed by John Entwistle of The Who. He had spotted one hanging in the reception area of the Warwick plant in Markneukirchen and spent an entire day playing it in the showroom. Warwick sent the instrument over for the recordings so he could try it before ordering his own custom version. The one used in the studio had a natural high-polish body with gold hardware; his own was to be black on black.
The same report records how often Yenz had changed instruments on the previous album, Battering Ram. He started out on his Gibson Thunderbird, switched to a Fender Precision, then a Music Man Stingray, and ended up recording on Piet's old Yamaha studio bass.
The same sessions produced a song Thomas Nack had not heard before, carrying the working title "Piesel's hit 2007". The report's author describes it as a bit Priest-like, with drum parts that reminded him of "Condition Red", a song he particularly liked live, and notes that it was the only one of its kind on the album. Thomas wrote the arrangement down on the spot and was recording it a little later.
After a long break, Iron Savior went back into the studio in August 2011. According to the official site, Thomas Nack had visited Pearl Drums in the Netherlands at the end of July to look at new equipment, and at the end of August he recorded the drum tracks at Rekorder Tonstudio in Hamburg, run by former Gamma Ray bassist Jan Rubach. Thomas said at the time that he had been missing metal for the past three years. Piet again produced.
In October 2013 Sielck posted an update on the next album. As on The Landing, they planned to bring two old Iron Savior songs up to date and re-record them, and he asked fans to suggest all-time favourites on the forum or the band's Facebook page. Drums, he wrote, would start the following week at Jan Rubach's Rekorder studio, again with Thomas — in his words, his absolute favourite drummer.
Skycrest was recorded the old-fashioned way. Sielck says that although earlier albums had sometimes been tracked separately, for this one they gathered at Powerhouse Studio and recorded almost everything together, because that is what gives the performance its live feel.
There is a story behind the white Solar guitar Sielck plays in the "Souleater" video. He had come across Solar guitars by chance the year before, liked them enough to order a model called the Blind, and found the instrument that arrived met his requirements perfectly in build, sound and looks. He did not abandon his B.C. Rich, though: on Skycrest the rhythm guitars are a combination, Solar in the left channel and B.C. Rich in the right.
The shape of Firestar was overturned at the last minute. Sielck says the cornerstones of the album were already in place and it was heading for a good record within the usual framework. Then, just before the recordings were finalised, inspiration struck him out of a clear sky. In a very short time he wrote two more songs out of nothing and changed a third on the spur of the moment — and with that, he says, Firestar went up another level. He admits the unexpected creative surge triggered great emotions in him.
The reissue was not a straight repress. It appeared on 24 April 2015 as Megatropolis 2.0, with a new mix and a large number of re-recordings, and the official site announced it alongside the band's first ever live DVD/CD, still to come. In his first post about the project Sielck had already reported that "The Omega Man" and "Megatropolis" were finished and sounding fat.
The first instalment, Reforged - Riding On Fire, came out as a nineteen-song double album. AFM describe the selection as the most popular and the best tracks the band had ever committed to CD, and say the new recordings, paired with a fresh mix by Sielck, come across more powerful and more incisive than the originals without losing the songs' character. The label also explains where the demand came from: interest in the early Iron Savior releases had risen noticeably since Titancraft gave the band its biggest chart success to date in 2016, and keeping the old songs available mattered a great deal to them.
In July 2017 Sielck reported on the official site that the major re-recording project covering the "Noise years" was in its final stages. The examples he named were "Riding On Fire", "For The World", "Warrior", "Titans Of Our Time", "Battering Ram", "Iron Savior" and "Watcher in the Sky" — all of them, he wrote, in entirely new full-length versions.
Before The Landing came out, AFM Records ran an unusual countdown. From 10 November 2011 they uploaded one song a day to SoundCloud, each available to stream for twenty-four hours before being replaced by the next. The song Sielck announced on day one was "Starlight" — the only one, as he pointed out, that would stay online permanently.
In October 2011 the band announced its AFM Records deal and the new album, The Landing, at the same time. The announcement on the official site states plainly that the record was made by the same line-up that had recorded Condition Red in 2002. It was set for release on 18 November 2011, with "Heavy Metal Never Dies" offered as a streaming preview.
The Landing was reissued as a 10th Anniversary Edition on 19 November 2021, exactly ten years after the original. AFM Records describe the edition as carrying three bonus tracks and, beyond that, a completely new mix and master by Sielck himself, with the artwork reworked by Felipe Machado Franco. The label counts the album among the band's most successful and treats it as the record that sounded a kind of resurrection for Iron Savior at the time.
The Landing appeared on vinyl for the first time on 26 May 2017. According to the official site, AFM Records offered two versions, Pale Blue and Clear Orange, each pressed on 180-gram heavy vinyl and limited to 250 copies. The existing jewel-case CD and digipak, the announcement adds, remained available.
The release of Kill or Get Killed slipped by a week. In an announcement on 12 March 2019 AFM Records apologised for the delay on the band's behalf and, to bridge the gap, put out a special video for the album track "Stand Up And Fight". The new date was 15 March 2019, and the label described the record as the tenth studio album by the Hamburg power metal outfit.
In December 2006 the band pulled out of the X-Mas Metal-Fest show at the Aladin in Bremen. The announcement on the official site explains that the local promoter had paid none of his contractual fees by the deadline of noon on 20 December. Making an exception, they argued, would only encourage other promoters to think Iron Savior did not need to be paid. They added that it was a particular shame because they had never played Bremen and had all been looking forward to it. The same post let slip that the next album would be called Megatropolis and was due in the spring of 2007.
In January 2013 Sielck left a short post on the official site. They were getting ready for a Saturday show with their friends in the Hamburg band Paragon, with rehearsal starting at half past ten the next morning. He called it their first live appearance in Hamburg for years, and promised anyone who could make it to the Knust that they would do their best to rock the place apart.
Iron Savior's relationship with Russia begins in April 2012. Back from shows in St Petersburg and Moscow, Sielck wrote on the official site that the concerts had turned out really cool — technical problems in Moscow aside — and that the fans had been awesome. He also noted, with some amusement, that searching YouTube for "Iron Savior live" would turn up almost the entire Moscow set, including what he called the "guitar amp repair song".
The band returned to Moscow at the end of 2014. In his report on the official site Sielck names the venue as Club Volta and thanks the support act Shadow Host for providing the backline, along with Delta Mekong Concerts for making it happen. The setlist he posted runs through "Last Hero", "Starlight", "The Savior", "Condition Red", "Heavy Metal Never Dies" and "Atlantis Falling" among others, and closes with "Breaking The Law".
When the Turin power metal band Airborn celebrated twenty years with a large concert event in 2015, the act topping the bill was Iron Savior. As the official announcement explains, Piet Sielck had worked with Airborn as producer and engineer since the very beginnings of the band. Airborn's set that night was recorded and filmed for a live DVD.
Titancraft came out on 20 May 2016, and five days later, on 25 May, the band threw an "after release show" at the Logo in Hamburg. The announcement on the official site promised the new album in all its formats — CD, digipak, clear vinyl and fan box — along with new Titancraft shirts, and said the band would be around for photographs and autographs. The guests that night were Airborn from Italy, who would go on sharing stages with Iron Savior.
At the start of 2016 Sielck reported on the state of the songwriting on Facebook, and the post was carried on the official site. What existed by then was a speed crusher, a bone-breaking uptempo number at "I've Been To Hell" pace, a waltz from hell, a killer rocker and a more progressive mid-tempo monster. The target, he wrote, was ten or eleven songs of Iron Savior quality. There were plenty of ideas, he added, but channelling them all into the right form was not easy — and if the god of songwriting did not fail him, the album would arrive in the first quarter of 2016, or at least the second.
Titancraft was announced in March 2016. The AFM Records statement quoted on the official site gives a release date of 20 May and lists the formats: CD, digipak, limited clear vinyl and a limited box set. The cover artwork was again by Felipe Machado Franco.
In 2009 Iron Savior took part in a charity project called "Stars for Charity: Yes We Can 2" in support of a German youth rowing club. As the official announcement explains, they joined Saxon, Gamma Ray, Edguy, Stormwarrior and many others in donating signed CDs, photographs, autograph cards and items such as signed drum skins and sticks, with all of the auction proceeds going towards a new single scull for the youngsters. The Iron Savior auctions opened on 15 October 2009.
According to the band summary posted on the official site, Iron Savior first broke into the charts with their second album: Unification made the top 100 in Germany.
In its artist profile AFM Records names Titancraft in 2016 and Kill Or Get Killed in 2019 as the band's chart successes. The same text cites the anthem "Heavy Metal Never Dies", streamed more than seven and a half million times, as evidence that the Hamburg band is on the right track.
The growth of "Heavy Metal Never Dies" can be traced through the label's own wording. Announcing Skycrest in October 2020, AFM Records put it at over seven and a half million streams; a year later, announcing the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Landing, they wrote that the song had by then been streamed far more than ten million times. The band's own site goes further still, stating that the anthem has passed fifteen million streams on Spotify alone.
The news column on the band's official site records that the 2023 album Firestar entered the German charts at number 34 and the Swiss charts at number 56.
AFM Records told the same story about "Dance With Somebody" through the official site. Sielck admits that the track was originally recorded to be a bonus for the limited edition, but that they simply liked it too much and finally decided to make it a regular album track. Who, the label asks, would have expected a Mando Diao cover version from the Hamburg band?
To mark the release of Rise of the Hero the band played a special live release show in their home town of Hamburg on 26 February 2014. The venue was the Rock Café in St. Pauli, and in an interview shortly beforehand Sielck said they naturally wanted to be in particularly good form for it.
The tour behind Kill or Get Killed ran to about twenty-five shows by Sielck's reckoning, the last of them in Russia in February 2020. Live work then stopped. In the same interview he says that playing to real fans in front of you and playing to a camera are not the same thing, since a real show depends on the interaction between artist and audience — but that it is of course better than doing nothing, and that they planned a streaming event for the world on 9 January.
Asked how his voice had stayed powerful more than two decades after the debut, Sielck gave a practical answer in three parts: he gave up smoking a few years earlier, he uses far more vocal technique than in the early days, and he tries to keep himself in shape as far as he can.
In the same interview Sielck set out his criteria for taking on outside production work. The rough one is time: Iron Savior keeps him busy, so there is little left over. Beyond that, a certain professional level matters, and so does the genre. He cannot do death metal, he says, because he is not a fan of it and would not know how to get it right — whereas classic metal and power metal are territory he knows well.
Kai Hansen and Thomen Stauch joined the first line-up for practical reasons rather than for their names. Sielck did not rate his own freely improvised lead playing at the time, so he asked his old friend Kai to lay down some solo work. Kai liked the material immediately and enjoyed making music with him again. For drums, Sielck was working closely with Blind Guardian in that period, which made asking Thomen the obvious move. That is how the first line-up came together.
There was no plan for a second album. Sielck has said the first record really was a project among friends, and that if he had set out to build a working band he would hardly have picked Kai and Thomen — two people he already knew would only be available on a limited basis.
The project turned into a band because events took over after the debut appeared. By Sielck's account everything changed once the record was out, and the whole thing developed a momentum he had not planned for. He now had to produce a band, and since Kai and Thomen were in every photograph and had actually played on the record, he could hardly turn round and say they were not in it.
The connection between Piet Sielck and Kai Hansen predates Helloween. Together with Ingo Schwichtenberg and Marcus Großkopf, the two played guitar and sang in Gentry, Second Hell and Iron Fist, the bands that led to Helloween. Sielck himself was never a member of Helloween.
Of the Gentry / Iron Fist / Second Hell line, it was Sielck who stepped away first; Helloween grew out of what Kai Hansen carried on. Sielck remembers being simply glad for his friend when Kai showed him the first Helloween record. Music was not much on his mind at that point, he says — girls were more interesting. He reports no regrets: a life of two hundred touring days a year was never what he wanted.
Sielck's first major production credit, Gamma Ray's debut Heading For Tomorrow, came about almost by accident. He was living in Los Angeles at the time and had just walked out of an audio engineering school that he felt was teaching him too little. Back in Germany on family business and intending to enrol somewhere better, he was talked into joining Kai in Hannover for the first Gamma Ray record instead. The stay ran to nearly five months, and he says he learned a great deal during it.
Before stepping out as a performer, Sielck built a career behind the desk, working as engineer and producer with Saxon, Blind Guardian, Uriah Heep, Grave Digger and Gamma Ray. He relaunched himself as a musician in 1995.
Kai Hansen's presence drew attention but also put the band in his shadow. Sielck has said Iron Savior came to be seen as an insignificant Gamma Ray offshoot, and that at the moments that mattered — the chance to tour with Grave Digger and Running Wild among them — Kai was not available. He does not lay this at Kai's door: everyone had known it would be that way, and Sielck says he should simply have drawn the conclusion much earlier.
Sielck describes Condition Red, the first album made without Kai Hansen, as something close to a liberation and a fresh start. The drive behind it, he says, was to prove to the critics that the "Iron Savior is nothing without Kai Hansen" stamp was simply wrong. He is careful not to belittle Kai's input, but insists that what shaped the band was the band itself.
On the parting itself, Sielck says the trouble began once a record deal arrived and the band had to become real. It worked well enough at first, but after a few years of either turning offers down or touring without Kai it was clear nothing would change, so they decided to separate. It may have been an unpopular decision at the time, he says, but looking back it was the wise one.
Sielck likens Jan-S. Eckert's return to the prodigal son finally coming home. When it became clear Yenz would not continue, Jan was the first name that came to mind. The reunion, he says, made everyone conscious of how long a road they had travelled together, and after all these years each of them associates Iron Savior with a feeling of home. It sounds sentimental, he admits, but that is how it is.
To stop live offers slipping away, the band has kept two standing deputies since 2011. When Jan cannot make a date, their friend Uwe Seemann steps in; when Piesel cannot, Jan Bertram of Paragon does. Sielck says the arrangement has made them far more flexible and allowed them to play more often than before — which is why both men appear as musicians in the album credits.
In January 2025 the band announced that Jan-S. Eckert had left. According to Sielck's statement the departure was at Jan's own request, and one the band ultimately had to accept. Patrick Opitz, who had already stood in for Jan during an earlier break, took over the bass duties permanently.
Sielck is blunt about Savage Circus, his other band. He joined seeing real potential and put in the work to make a strong album and turn it into a genuine band. There were good moments, he says, but he never managed to make it one: it stayed more or less a casting project with himself as the workhorse. After two albums he had no appetite for a third, citing how little — or nothing — the others were contributing.
Sielck is equally direct about why he came back. Doing Iron Savior again after four years, he says, showed him how much he had been missing it and how much passion he still had for it. Savage Circus had been an interesting chapter that he enjoyed, but his heart — even in the stretches when he did not realise it — had been beating for Iron Savior all along.
Sielck has accounted for the gap between Megatropolis in 2007 and The Landing in 2011. Two of those years belonged to Savage Circus; 2009 and 2010 went on the collapse of his own label, Dockyard 1. Clearing up after the company took a long time, cost him money and left him low, and during it he had no appetite for writing. He would go down to the studio and play a little now and then, he says, but nothing came of those sessions.
The turning point came in October 2010. Sielck sold what was left of Dockyard 1 to AFM Records and the distributor Soulfood Music, and says that was the moment he finally saw light at the end of the tunnel. From then on he felt better, went in and cleared out the studio and made it comfortable again — work that, he says, cleared his mind as well and let him write music once more.
In 2026 Iron Savior signed with Frontiers Music Srl. In his statement Sielck called it genuinely special, after all his years in the metal world, to set out with a new partner — and more special still because the move meant reconnecting with longtime friends and companions from his past. In the same statement he said the band would be celebrating thirty years of Iron Savior alongside the new album.
Sielck has personal ties to the United States. His mother has lived in San Francisco for over thirty years and is married to an American citizen; California has long been something like a second home to him, and he lived there himself for a time. It is the same background behind a remark in a 2014 interview, where he mentions being on holiday visiting his mother in San Francisco when the Unification artwork arrived.
Rise of the Hero is not a concept album, but one thread runs through it. As Sielck explains it, Atlantis had all but immortal "heroes" who watched over the fate of mankind. Immortal did not mean unkillable, and the betrayal and murder of the last of them brought the whole civilisation down. It was prophesied that the hero would one day return to save humanity again — but the one who returns is not the Iron Savior itself. It is the bio-unit, resurrected from the dead in the body of a newly created avatar as the Last Hero. Sielck names "Last Hero", "From Far Beyond Time", "Thunder From The Mountains" and "Firestorm" as the four songs that carry this part of the story.
The rest of that album steps outside the story. Sielck describes the remaining songs as "concept-free", ranging from fantasy through the film Kill Bill to the ordinary things in life that move him.
With the fifth album, Battering Ram, Sielck deliberately stepped away from the concept format. He remains a committed science-fiction fan, he says, but he did not want to sing about spaceships, evil robots, aliens and intergalactic incidents one more time. This time he wanted lyrics that gripped the songs as tightly as the songs gripped the listener. The bulk of them turn on his own views about metal and how it shapes daily life, and unlike the very particular earlier lyrics — which some fans had found hard to follow — they were meant to be relatively easy to grasp. Even so, three songs were given over to continuing the saga for the fans who would have been bitterly disappointed to see it simply stop.
"Riding Free" turned out to be the hardest song on Battering Ram. Its subject is terrorism and war, and Sielck says he knew that while he was still composing it. The darkness of the theme, plus the sheer anger he was carrying about the news at the time, pushed the music that far. With the bulletins showing nothing but casualties and one suicide attack after another, the sense that there was nothing he could do turned into rage. He does not normally feel called to improve the world, he says, but in this case he had to use the record he was about to release to do at least something.
Deathbringer, with a release date of 13 November 2026, marks Iron Savior's return to the concept album format. The press material sets out the plot: after two hundred years of peace the galaxy is on the brink again, because the Shadows — an insectoid species and an ancient enemy of mankind — have returned. Aboard the gigantic Deathbringer vessel their immortal Queen has preserved the last remnants of her species inside an eternal digital hive, sustained by the life force of countless worlds. The Iron Savior and the Alliance now face an enemy more powerful than any before.
The second single from Deathbringer, "The Creature's Tale", takes up Frankenstein. Sielck observes that the classic story has been told in many ways but never seems to lose its fascination, least of all in a modern world of biogenetic manipulation and artificial intelligence, where the question of what life is has still not been answered adequately. What set the song off was the 2025 Netflix film, and in particular its closing stretch, where the story is narrated by the creature.
On artwork, Sielck calls Felipe Machado Franco the first artist ever able to catch his vision for a cover almost instantly. He had worked with others before, he says, and it was always complicated, sometimes with poor results. Unification and Dark Assault in particular were real disappointments, even though he had given his best to make himself understood. Working with Felipe, by contrast, almost feels to him like having his mind read.
Sielck remembers the day the Unification artwork arrived in some detail. He was on holiday visiting his mother in San Francisco, and the file came in over a 56k modem. He watched the image build up on screen bit by bit, at what he calls torturing slowness, for almost an hour.
Felipe Machado Franco has handled the artwork since 2011 and The Landing. A Tower Records article makes the point directly, noting that he took over the covers with that album and that this settled the band's visual direction in the years since. AFM Records made the same observation when Firestar appeared, describing Felipe as having worked with Iron Savior since 2011.
Sticking with Felipe Machado Franco drew some criticism, because his style is recognisable at a glance. Sielck knows this and answers that having a high recognition value in your work, whatever it is, strikes him as a good thing rather than a bad one. It is not that Felipe is the only person who can make artwork, he says: he is simply very good at it, gets booked a lot as a result, and so his style is present everywhere. For Sielck it was never an issue, because Felipe turns his ideas into images almost one to one.
The cover of Firestar shows the Iron Savior spaceship that has been present on the band's sleeves since 2011. The press material credits the striking artwork to Felipe Machado Franco and describes it as lifting the album further.
Rise of the Hero appeared about half a year later than originally planned, and the reason was the pressure Sielck had put on himself. He knew from the outset that he had a hard nut to crack, and the knowledge weighed on him to the point of blocking him. He became far more critical of his own compositions, which pushed the release back. Once he finally managed to get some distance and free himself from that self-imposed pressure, he says, the ideas came back.
Sielck works to a few fixed principles. He builds the drum sound without any samples at all, on the grounds that it stays far more dynamic and alive than if it were underpinned with static ones. He also uses very little copy and paste: choir tracks may be duplicated — they do not resing twenty-four of them for every chorus — but bass, drums and guitars are played through as a matter of principle and never copied, and the lead vocal largely the same. The point, he says, is to keep the music alive.
On his guitar sound Sielck says it is something of a trade secret, then explains how he arrived at it. He sat down and experimented at length with different amps and guitars in every combination, working towards a goal he already had in mind: a mixture of British Steel and Accept with a modern distortion. The awkward part, he adds, is that he likes the sound so much that he uses it on other people's productions too — which cuts into his own advantage, but he can hardly give a client a bad sound just to protect it.
The title track of Firestar runs at 176 bpm, making it one of the fastest songs in the band's history. The press material has Sielck pitching it as a massive track combining the power of the debut with the energy of Condition Red and an old-school-meets-modern production, one that would not be leaving anyone's player for a long time.
Asked what he would change about his own records, Sielck answered specifically. Dark Assault he would produce completely differently today: at the time he was so determined to top Unification that he made it far too bombastic, and in his view the songs are good but a sometimes grating grandeur keeps them from playing to their strengths. That, he says, is exactly why "I've Been To Hell" was picked for re-recording on Rise of the Hero. Condition Red and The Landing he would leave alone, and on Battering Ram he would only tighten the occasional awkward piece of writing or arrangement.
The idea behind Reforged is visible in an interview three years before the project started. Asked whether he had ever considered collecting the rarities, cover versions and Japanese bonus tracks into a compilation or a box set, Sielck said yes — with one condition. For legal reasons they could not use the original recordings, so the songs would have to be re-recorded the same way they had been on The Landing and Rise of the Hero. What he pictured was a double album piling up all their classics, shaped to last for the next few decades.
Reforged: Ironbound (Vol. 2) appeared on 26 August 2022 through AFM Records with twenty-three tracks, clearly more than the first instalment. Sielck says the positive reaction to volume one, and the direct feedback from fans showing how many further candidates for remakes were still lying around, is what prompted them to think about a sequel. In his own opinion, it surpasses the first.
The Reforged series closed with a third volume, Reforged - Machine World, in August 2025. As BURRN! ONLINE reports, the finale came out on Perception, a new label under Reigning Phoenix Music, and draws mainly on songs from the early 2000s. The series had begun in the first place as a way of bringing back the Noise Records-era material whose CDs had gone out of stock and become hard to find, at the request of the band's own fans.
Each volume of Reforged is also characterised by the cover version that closes it. Volume two, Reforged - Ironbound, ended with an unexpected take on Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams"; the concluding Machine World ends, characteristically, with a Judas Priest cover — though not an obvious one, but "Starbreaker" from 1977's Sin After Sin. BURRN! ONLINE points to the depth of Sielck's Priest devotion, noting that Iron Savior had previously covered "Rage", another low-profile track, from British Steel.
The limited edition of Condition Red came with a free concert ticket for every buyer. Sielck says everyone thought the idea was great and the shows themselves were a blast for band and audience alike, but the run-up went wrong in several places. They had backed the wrong booker, who managed to leave the venue and time off the tickets altogether, and the whole thing then had to be pushed from September to November. Even so, he reports, roughly 300 to 350 fans turned up each night and celebrated with them.
There is a practical reason Iron Savior play live comparatively rarely. Sielck points out that he has his studio, that Piesel is often on the road as a tour manager, mixer or guitar tech, and that Thomas has a great many other drumming jobs. Simply finding dates that suit everyone, he says, can be hard.
Sielck is equally frank about how they tour. Most of the band hold down day jobs that have to come first — they fill the fridge. Touring on your own account is financially risky, he says, and especially in the United States, where thousands of dollars go on travel before the first note is played. With families and children at home they cannot be away for weeks with no income. Their solution was to play weekends only, and only for a guaranteed fee.
The trip to Hammerfest V in North Wales in March 2013 was a travel disaster. By Sielck's account it took an hour just to collect the rental car in Manchester; leaving the city they got stuck on the M56 with a flat tyre; and after fixing that they sat in a traffic jam without moving for over an hour. They reached the festival at 6:45pm, went straight to the stage, set up and started playing on the spot. The stress beforehand produced a few mistakes, he wrote, but they played a fair show and the audience gave them a very warm reception.
The track selection on Awesome Anthems Of The Galaxy is confined firmly to mainstream British and American hits of the 1980s. Its seventeen songs include Irene Cara's "Fame" and "What A Feeling", A-ha's "Take On Me", Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Relax", Phil Collins' "Against All Odds", Journey's "Separate Ways", Pet Shop Boys' "Suburbia", Alphaville's "Forever Young" and Blondie's "Call Me". For "Take On Me" the band went as far as shooting a video that parodies the famous original.
Sielck frames the covers album as a continuation rather than a departure. The pop-to-metal transformation, he says, carries on what began with Seal's "Crazy" and Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams". He is proud of the outcome, he adds, because it never loses the original vibe of the tracks and yet is one hundred per cent Iron Savior.
In October 2023 Sielck reported that his treatment was over. The surgery had gone extremely well; after three nights of intensive care as standard post-operative procedure, the doctors were very happy with his progress and it looked likely he would be sent home the next day. He added what he called an almost funny aside: the chemotherapy had worked so well that all they had taken out were the remains of a totally dead tumour, with no living tumour cells at all. He would now recover and go through a second, precautionary round of chemotherapy.
In 2025 Iron Savior withdrew from ProgPower USA, the festival due to take place in Atlanta that September. In a public statement Piet Sielck gave the political situation in the United States at the time as the reason, saying the band no longer felt safe or welcome in the country. The statement closes by expressing the hope of returning to Atlanta another time in a better world, and asking people to understand and accept the decision.
The withdrawal drew a backlash, and within days Sielck published a follow-up. To those accusing him of making a political statement on the fans' backs, he replied that this was not the case. The only reason for not travelling, he wrote, was the concern that by September things might be considerably worse, and that it could be dangerous for people like them, who criticise the government openly, to visit. It had never been their intention to make a political statement, nor to hurt anyone's feelings or insult them; they had simply given the truth of what had led them to the decision.