Metal City

The first Raven studio album with Mike Heller, who had replaced Joe Hasselvander in 2017, released on 18 September 2020 by SPV/Steamhammer. Gallagher described it before release as a piece of time travel back to 1982 — the record the band would have made straight after Wiped Out — naming "The Power" as the opener, "Human Race" as the fast one and "When Worlds Collide" as the epic. It did not go smoothly. The first attempt at tracking guitars and bass was abandoned outright. The band ran into Michael Wagener by chance on a rock cruise and asked him on the spot to mix the record; with Heller's own studio unfinished, Wagener offered his Nashville room and engineered bass, guitar and vocals over about two weeks, while Heller engineered his own drums. Unhappy with the mix, they ended up handing it to Zeuss, whose version Gallagher calls big and meaty. Over thirty songs were written, and the difficulty was choosing the ten that would fit a deliberately short thirty-five to forty minutes. The title track is dedicated to Newcastle upon Tyne. The brothers allow that the city has been called Metal City for good reason, but say the song is really about a mindset — the tenacity of the people there — rather than about music. The comic-book artwork started as a T-shirt idea from Heller showing the three of them running, and grew into separate art for each song and a thank-you page laid out like an old Marvel ad. Ward Records issued the Japanese edition the same day as GQCS-90867, with "Rock This Town" added.