Virtuoso guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen‘s new studio album, Hell Or High Water, will be released on 13th November through Music Theories Recordings/Artone Label Group. Whetting the appetite is the album’s first single, ‘Now Or Never’.
Hell Or High Water‘s nine tracks were crafted away from the distractions that stall the creative process in the modern age. Malmsteen first tried this with 2021’s Parabellum, largely because of the state of the world at the time, and the results were so strong that he decided to stick with it as his modus operandi moving forward.
“When I started making records, I would just take the songs I had lying around,” he admitted. “Later on, I fell into a schedule: make a record, tour the record and then write the next record. Over the pandemic, I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months. I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”
For a man born with a gift to conjure up overtures “out of nowhere”, the science behind writing a song is hard to explain. In any case, he’s grateful for the abundance of gold-standard ideas that do arrive, the kind that would take other musicians months or even years to realise.
“Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” he reasoned. “It’s like that movie Amadeus. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form. I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like. If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want. The language of music is simple. There are certain notes that belong together in whatever stylistic direction and sound pleasant to the ear. The ideas don’t come all the time, but when they do, it’s like an avalanche. The pieces I choose for my records are like gifts that I capture because they amaze me. I’m very lucky in that sense.”
Lead single ‘Now Or Never’ has been described as “a perfect storm of palm-muted riffing, baroque counterpart melodies, soaring vocals and mind-blowing dexterity”. If you’re looking for Malmsteen in a nutshell, this is very much it, and similar could be said of the second track and instrumental pièce de résistance ‘Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water’.
‘(On The) Battlefield’ and ‘Eye For An Eye’ feature some of the singer and guitarist’s strongest vocal performances to date, alongside the stunning instrumentals ‘Antikythera’ and ‘Beyond Zeta Reticuli’, both named after important scientific breakthroughs and discoveries.
Hell Or High Water is said to be an album bursting with emotion from all corners, but the closing track ‘Father’ is undoubtedly the most spirited of them all, written in tribute to the guitar legend’s late father.
“He was an amazing man,” remembered Malmsteen. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it. Niccolò Paganini once said, ‘One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly.’ It’s one thing to be a typewriter and another to be someone who writes stories that can touch people. That was always the point.”
All these years on, Yngwie J. Malmsteen looks and sounds more determined than ever. If the music feels good to him, that’s enough. Anyone else liking it is a bonus.
