The Lord of Steel

In the autumn of 2010 the band named its next album as Hammer of the Gods, the first part of The Asgard Saga, a multimedia fantasy project with the author Wolfgang Hohlbein. The album whose title it revealed in May 2012 was The Lord of Steel, presented not as a concept album like Gods of War (2007) but as a record on which each song tells a story of its own. Bassist Joey DeMaio said the band had talked about a concept album and then felt drawn in another direction, and he set the record against Gods of War, whose orchestras, choirs and marching armies had needed room in the mix: with fewer instruments, each one could be louder. DeMaio wrote every song, four of them, the title track, "Born in a Grave", "Righteous Glory" and "The Kingdom of Steel", with guitarist Karl Logan. The booklet credits the writing, engineering, recording, editing and production to DeMaio, with additional recording and editing by Dirk Kloiber at Haus Wahnfried, and Ronald Prent mixed the album at Wisseloord Studios in the Netherlands. Eric Adams sings, Donnie Hamzik plays drums, and Joe Rozler and Francisco Palomo play keyboards. "El Gringo", the theme of the action film of the same name, was the first song the band wrote for a Hollywood film and is a homage to Ennio Morricone; "Expendable" took its cue from Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables films. The album first appeared as the limited Hammer Edition: in June 2012 it was sold as a download from the band's online store and iTunes, and then as a ten-track CD with the limited Steel Edition of issue 233 of the British magazine Metal Hammer; the band says that edition sold out at once. The retail edition, with new mixes and arrangements, an extra song, "The Kingdom of Steel", new artwork by Ken Kelly and a 24-page booklet, was moved from 28 September to 19 October 2012. It reached No. 19 on the German albums chart, No. 20 in Finland and No. 41 in Sweden.