Emerald Eye’s Night Without Day is the type of speed metal you’ve been waiting for in 2024

It’s hard not to listen to Emerald Eye’s recent release Night Without Day and not have a visceral reaction. The power metal/hard rock newcomers just put out a behemoth on April 5, mastered by producer Benjamin Axel Harvey. The seven-song, 40-minute collection is chock-full of gems from start to finish. Since, they have been receiving some attention inside the genre realm, as well as across the globe.

Greek metal publication Forgotten Scroll Heavy Metal Magazine covered it, as well as NWOTHM—a YouTube channel that gathers the best “Old School Heavy Metal Albums” from the new generation.

The instrumental intro track “Tabula Viridis” sets the scene, finishing with a scream after various guitar rhythms to lead into “Winged Woman”—a song that exemplifies the best of what the KC group has to offer. The speediness from the guitars and double bass is certifiably insane, making the song go from the first second. Multiple guitar solos from Alex Moran take over most of the track, while Nolan Weber steals the end on the drums. Singer Brett Scott carries himself like a veteran classic rock/metal vocalist, with various radical changes on the fly to reach entirely new levels within a split second. Old-school metal lyrics in the chorus ring true, with Scott yelping, “Winged woman, I will catch you if you fall” and “On and on, blood will spill.”

This is further evident on the following cut “Silken Throne”—a six-and-a-half minute blistering that manages to go quicker and harder than its predecessor. And I must say it again: The vocals are the best part of this record, and this might be the best cut. The first two minutes of “Throne” are a full song on its own, with enough varying degrees of vocal techniques to wonder if Emerald Eye’s band members are indeed veterans—not somebody whose first release was just three years back. More screams at the five-minute mark of the six-and-a-half minute song are followed by multiple guitar solos at the same time.

Emerald Eye. // Photo Courtesy of Emerald EYe

The next two tracks, “Revenge of the Being” and “Whirlwind,” are more straight-forward and mid-tempo, and will definitely result in a very committed and audience-friendly live performance. “Revenge” is more of a chant song, with lots of bass—courtesy of Nick Poffinbarger—in the verses and with, you guessed it, more solos. “Whirlwind” doesn’t have as much of a soaring chorus, as the verses seem to blend in with the hooks fairly well. The breakdown after the second hook makes the five-and-a-half minute cut worth coming back to.

Sixth and penultimate track “Feast and Famine” almost reminds me of a long-lost The Dillinger Escape Plan demo, beginning with a stadium-like guitar open, with guitar solos that almost feel like a joke to this point. The lyrics are hard to make out, but this is almost as adventurous as top track “Silken.” “Hellstar” closes everything out with a 10-minute long anthem that is a more drawn-out version of the previous inclusions, with more varied instrumentation. There are lots of space sounds and the vocals are once again consistently changing.

Scott once again hones in a heaping vocal performance, with lines toward the end like, “Pay for the children, dead in the street/Pay for the innocent, choking in the heat.” The final two minutes feature a looping of multiple vocal lines with the instrumentation, while two different keyboard tracks end the record.

This is certainly a sign of things to come for a group just getting its feet wet in this realm, with only a 2021 demo under its name—a release that featured both “Winged Woman” and “Revenge of the Being.”

The foursome is playing Farewell on Saturday, May 25, alongside Lurking Corpses, Electric Assault, and Hellevate. Details on that show here.