Kingmaker

Kingmaker, released November 4, 2016, is the fifteenth studio album and sits on a hinge in the band's line-up. Morten Sandager, who had played keyboards since 2006, left that February; Chris Laney joined in September on keyboards and guitars. This is the first record made by that configuration. Across twelve songs it holds the weight of the preceding albums while giving the keyboards a clearer job. Songs built on a thick riff outline — the title track, "Face the World" — sit beside ones that push the vocal forward, such as "Was That What You Wanted," and the keys work as structure rather than decoration. Having a player at that station who can also take a second guitar shows up directly in how dense the record sounds. By this point the band had played its first American show at ProgPower in September 2012 and marked thirty years at Tivoli in Copenhagen in 2011. Deep into a long career, Pretty Maids were still revising both the line-up and the sound album by album.