Album Review: Fit For A King – The Path

Fit For A King are one of those bands who always seem to be just… there. The Path is their sixth album in a decade, and they’ve never been less than consistent and highly effective. Despite this, they’ve never really made that step up to modern metal’s top table. The Path, however, is the sound of a band making a big, energised effort to change all that.

Everything on here sounds clean and accessible, even when it’s stomping out a Godzilla-sized trail of destruction. There are some seriously weighty riffs peppered throughout the album, as well as those crunching breakdowns, but it all sounds a little too polished and honed. They’ve traded the spit and grit of a sweat-slicked club for the scale and bombast of the arena, with both positive and negative results.

They haven’t taken the nu-metal route that so many of their peers have in recent years, and this is still very much a metalcore album, but with a few extra ingredients scattered about. Opener The Face Of Hate and follow-up Breaking The Mirror up the rock and metal quotient, with clean guitar lines and wailing solos. The title track borrows from latter-day Parkway Drive in its measured hooks and God Of Fire mixes slamming breakdowns and skittering electronica in more or less equal measure.

It all sounds big and bold and, when they deliver those gold-plated hooks on the likes of Locked (In My Head) and the superb Louder Voice, you really can picture them raising arena roofs if and when such things become a reality once more. Annihilation is pure circle-pit fodder and Vendetta concludes things closer to the hardcore side of the spectrum, and this is overall a sharper, bolder, more offering from a band who might just succeed in using it as a launch pad to bigger things.

Verdict: 3/5

For Fans Of: Parkway Drive, Bury Tomorrow, Blessthefall

The Path is released on September 18 via Solid State and is available to pre-save/pre-order now.

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