Kings of Metal

The second album under Manowar's Atlantic Records contract came out in November 1988. According to the history the band posted on its website in 2000, the title was a name that fans around the world had given the band's members. The line-up was the one that had made Fighting the World, Eric Adams, Ross the Boss, Joey DeMaio and Scott Columbus, and the band produced the album with Jason Flom as executive producer. Rich Breen once more recorded and mixed it at Universal Recording in Chicago. Ross the Boss later called it the band's second digital record and said the step up in sound from its predecessor was plain to hear. Part of the work took the band to England, where the Canoldir Male Choir, directed by Clive Griffiths, was recorded in St. Paul's Cathedral in Birmingham; the band's history names "The Crown and the Ring" as one of the songs it sings on. The crowd on the title track was recorded live at the Thirsty Whale in River Grove, Illinois. "The Warrior's Prayer" is a spoken piece for the voices of a grandfather and his grandson, read by Arthur Pendragon Wilshire and Grant Williams, and "Sting of the Bumblebee" is credited as arranged and adapted by DeMaio. DeMaio wrote the songs, the title track and "Hail and Kill" together with Ross the Boss. The LP holds nine tracks; the CD adds "Pleasure Slave" between "Kingdom Come" and "Hail and Kill", and the American CD labels it a bonus track. In Germany the album entered the chart dated 26 December 1988 at No. 56, peaked at No. 37 and stayed for 15 weeks, and the BVMI certified it gold in 1994. It was Ross the Boss's last album with Manowar. His successor, David Shankle, has said that he was chosen from around 150 guitarists in 1988, sat in on the mixing of this album and toured it, and Columbus, by his own account, left at the turn of 1990. In 2014 the band released Kings of Metal MMXIV, an entirely new recording of the album.