Century - Sign Of The Storm - CD

Formed in 2020, CENTURY have hastened their ascent of the true-metal underground on the strength of 2023’s The Conquest of Time debut album. While both members of the duo are veterans of the metal underground, with CENTURY do they uphold the noble, heroic sound of early Swedish heavy metal – namely, the cult icons of Heavy Load, Overdrive, Gotham City, and Axewitch. Now, with their second album, they’re set to eclipse that miniclassic. Titled Sign of the Storm, CENTURY’s sophomore full-length builds on all the strengths of the debut and sends everything further back in time. Amazingly, Sign of the Storm sounds timestamped strictly at 1982. From songwriting – brisk in its energy but never belabored, almost casual in its overt heroism, with riffs on the right side of hot-rockin’ and not without a twinge of melancholy – on to the production – clean and spacious but not lacking grit, “big” but in an authentically underground way, conveying both castle high and dungeon low – CENTURY here offer swords & sorcery heavy metal like few others in the modern era. To say Sign of the Storm sounds truly OLD is not a disservice to either that production nor especially the songwriting (or even guitarist’s Staffan Tengnér’s impassioned, olde-worlde vocals); it simply underlines the fact that the duo are absolute masters of their eldritch domestic idiom, and that this latest album deserves to be spoken in the same discussion as those aforementioned legends. “No Time for Tomorrow” – the medieval metal past is alive with CENTURY!