Wake Up the Wicked

Wake Up the Wicked, released by Napalm Records on July 26, 2024, is Powerwolf's tenth studio album and its fourth No. 1 on the Official German Albums Chart. Joost van den Broek produced it, as he had the two records before. Across eleven songs and roughly forty minutes it shows clearly what the band has kept and what it has cut away after twenty years. The opening “Bless 'em With the Blade” stacks choir-shaped vocals over the organ and reaches its chorus without preamble. “1589” — named for the year of a witch trial — sets a heavy tread against a wide melody, while “Sinners of the Seven Seas” turns maritime folklore straight into a song built for a crowd. “Heretic Hunters” and “Thunderpriest” push speed and repetition forward, and “Joan of Arc” tells its story at a solemn mid-tempo. Nothing here is an experiment. The record instead rearranges the vocabulary Powerwolf has spent two decades assembling — organ, choir, mock-liturgical phrasing, the contrast of beast and saint — into its most efficient form. Through to the closing “Vargamor,” every song is shaped so an audience can sing it back the first time it hears it. This is the band's style at its finished state.