Undress Your Madness

Undress Your Madness came out on Frontiers Records on November 8, 2019, the band's sixteenth studio album. Allan Sørensen, who had replaced Allan Tschicaja in May 2017, is on drums. Pretty Maids had pulled out of their September 2019 ProgPower appearance citing personnel changes, and the record followed weeks later. Its twelve songs push the Frontiers-era formula further rather than away: thick guitar and keyboards underneath, Ronnie Atkins routed to the chorus by the shortest path available. Tracks that drive on both speed and melody, the title song and "Serpentine" among them, alternate with lower-slung ones such as "Slavedriver." Ken Hammer plays to the outline of the vocal rather than over it, and nothing here sounds like a band nearly forty years into its career. Four months after release, in March 2020, Atkins disclosed that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer at the end of 2019. The band did not perform again for five years, returning at Copenhell in June 2024. This record is therefore the last one standing before that silence.