The Triumph of Steel

Four years after Kings of Metal, two of the four members had changed. David Shankle, who had joined in 1988, played the guitars and Rhino the drums, beside Eric Adams and Joey DeMaio, and this is the only Manowar album either of them plays on. According to the history the band posted on its website in 2000, Manowar used those years to build a studio of its own in New York and named it Haus Wahnfried, after the house of the composer Richard Wagner; the album was recorded there. Editing and tape transfer were done at Air Waves in Chicago, the mix at Chicago Recording Company in the same city, and the mastering at Masterdisk in New York. Manowar produced it, with John Pettigrass as associate producer and Rich Breen as engineer. The album opens with "Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts", a 28-minute suite inspired by Homer's Iliad and built from a prelude and eight sections. The CD holds it as a single track with an index point for each part, and on the double LP it fills the first two sides. DeMaio wrote the songs; "Ride the Dragon", "Burning", "The Demon's Whip" and "Master of the Wind" are co-written with Shankle, who has said that he wrote about half of the material. "Metal Warriors" was also released as a single. Atlantic Records released the album in September 1992. It entered the German chart dated 12 October at No. 35, climbed to No. 8 and spent 11 weeks there; in the United States it entered Billboard's Heatseekers chart on 31 October at No. 22, its peak, and stayed for three weeks. The BVMI certified it gold in Germany in 2003. The band's history recalls that when the album reached Greece, fans thronged the largest record shop in Athens and more copies had to be rushed in. Before the next album, Shankle gave way to Karl Logan in 1994 and Scott Columbus returned on drums.