Wake Up to the Real World

Wake Up to the Real World, released on November 10, 2006, was the band's first album for Frontiers Records and their eleventh overall. It had been scheduled for 2005 and slipped by a year, during which two chairs changed. Michael Fast, behind the kit since 1991, left in July 2005; Allan Tschicaja, previously of Royal Hunt and Kingdom Come, arrived in April 2006. Morten Sandager of Mercenary joined on keyboards the same year. The eleven songs open heavily — the title track into "All in the Name of Love" and "I Am the End." "Why Die for a Lie" and "Terminal Violence" drive on speed and delivery, while "Perfect Strangers" and "Another Shot of Your Love" put the vocal at the centre. Keyboards run throughout for the first time, and that decision set the shape of every Frontiers-era record that followed. Read against what preceded it — the 2002 bankruptcy of the band's management company and the legal and financial mess that followed, and Ken Hammer's heart attack and full recovery in 2003 — this is not simply a first album for a new label. It is the record of a band getting going again.