Album review : INSANIA – The Great Apocalypse

Frontiers Music [Release date 13.06.25]

Naming your album The Great Apocalypse leaves Insania with a lot to live up to. Still, there’s nothing wrong with ambition, naked or otherwise.

It’s an interesting album, advertised as power metal. In fact the band nudge the needle of their stylistic compass back and forth through several metal related sub genres, like symphonic metal and indeed melodic metal.

And once you learn that their sound was born in the bowels of Iron Maiden’s primal howl and Helloween’s battle hardened riffery, you understand which route they have taken.

There’s not a huge amount of variation in the way the arrangements are put together, or in the narratives.

It begins well though.

‘The Trinity’ and ‘Indestructible’ are fine openers, hymnlike polemics with a show tune ambience… all delivered in a glorious rush of amplitude, speed and complexity, urging us to rise and fight “against the slavery of mankind”.

Subsequent tracks try hard to be illustrative, threading the same moral themes and concepts through the lyrics, while the songs quake with pneumatically powered riffs and pumping rhythms.

But if you drill down into each track’s DNA, you find the same protest song, telling us time and again that we’re all going to hell in a hand cart.

Niklas Dahlin’s fluid axework permeates each track – most notably ‘No One’s Hero’ and ‘The Great Apocalypse’ – with a sense of drama, tying the music together with a sense of carefully controlled chaos.

Revolution’ is almost speed metal. Speedy metal if you like, bound together by guitar and keyboard frills and fills, tones and textures, while stirring solos add pedal to the metal momentum.

‘The Prophesier’ drops into more mainstream power metal slot, and is all the better for it. Lyrically though there’s a strong sense of sameness. The anti-establishment generalisations only take you so far. You need to get into specifics to hold the listeners attention. ***

Review by Brian McGowan

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