Ranking the Bolt Thrower Albums

or: Lonely Are the Glorious. An Ode to a Band Like No Other.

Around the time Those Once Loyal was released, Bolt Thrower had a very active message board on their website where several band members, especially Jo Bench, would frequently interact with fans in their usual down-to-earth way. My favorite memory from those days is when I posted a thread asking the band for confirmation of the lyrics to the original version of “Destructive Infinity”; the Peel Sessions CD had a recording of the song with a totally different chorus than the one that later ended up on War Master, but the lyrics printed in the booklet were the War Master version. So I figured them out as best I could and asked the band if I had it right. Jo responded with complete surprise, saying she didn’t even know what I was talking about, but sure enough, she went and checked and said not only did she not realize the lyrics were printed incorrectly on that album, but she’d forgotten that they were ever different in the first place, and what I had come up with sounded about right. I had literally out-trivia’d Jo Bench about early Bolt Thrower, and I remember this like it happened yesterday.

I’m leading with this anecdote so that you understand who you’re listening to. I’m such a Bolt Thrower nerd that it’s really kind of embarrassing.

Anyway, if you had asked me to rank Bolt Thrower’s albums a few years ago, I would have refused. You can’t make me choose. They’re all great for different reasons. But now that it’s been 15 years since the release of Those Once Loyal and they’ve said they’re never doing another one (and when Bolt Thrower say things like that, they actually, you know, mean them), I think I’m finally ready to do this.

8. Honour Valour Pride

I doubt anyone will find this surprising, but it kind of was for me. For years, I had always maintained that Dave Ingram was the only person who could ever possibly replace Karl Willets, and those times that I saw him perform with the band, it certainly looked like I was right. He had the growling voice with the British accent still somehow discernible, and he was a hell of a presence on stage as well. To this day, I don’t understand what happened with the vocals on this album, but they sound like shit, and the less said about them, the better.

Instead, I’ll tell you what I really think is wrong with this one, because it’s actually not the vocals. Honour Valour Pride is like the distillation of everything that was ever wrong with Bolt Thrower, if such a thing exists. If they had one weakness, it was the fact that all of their albums had at least one filler track. A formulaic four-minute piece with a couple of nondescript riffs that somehow sounded like every other Bolt Thrower song and had no reason to exist. Honour Valour Pride basically consists of nothing but such filler tracks with maybe one or two exceptions – obviously “Inside the Wire” is a good song. The rest is little more than riffs you’ve heard better on other albums and the exact same double bass on/double bass off dynamic, over and over again. If you wanted to prove to someone that all Bolt Thrower sounds the same, this is the album to do it with. And that’s far worse to me than the inexplicably shitty vocals – yes, Bolt Thrower is a band that very much had a formula that they stuck to, but every other one of their albums is good at something, it marks some sort of interesting new wrinkle in the band’s development, it has something that makes it stand out, but Honour Valour Pride only stands out as their only kind of boring and vanilla effort.

7. In Battle There Is No Law

Second from the bottom and this already hurts to do. Let’s face it, though – mad kvlt cred notwithstanding, this is a fun album, but it isn’t a particularly good Bolt Thrower album. I like In Battle. I do. But it’s basically five people who sound like they’re having a lot of fun and no idea what they’re doing. Occasionally they trip over something that sounds like a Bolt Thrower riff, but then they just fall down the stairs again. Not to mention Andy Whale plays blastbeats like someone who read about them once, but never actually heard one.

Now don’t get me wrong here, that raw enthusiasm is what’s great about a lot of albums like this, and the weird not-really-blastbeats are exactly the kind of accidental originality that I love about this type of stuff, but remember, these are all good albums, I’m just ranking them, and this one isn’t as good as the next six.

6. …For Victory

Before I get to why it isn’t ranked higher, I really want to let the world know that …For Victory has two of my all-time favorite Bolt Thrower songs – “Lest We Forget”, and “Tank (Mk.I)”. It’s just that it doesn’t have a whole lot else. It’s basically The IVth Crusade lite. Similar crunchy sound, just not as warm and organic, similar mix of melodic parts and groove riffs, just not as varied, and overall nowhere near as many memorable songs. That last observation may be totally subjective, but I will insist that the two albums are basically two versions of the same overall style, and any ranking of the Bolt Thrower catalog is going to have to choose one of them over the other.

I also think that while it’s a far better album, …For Victory also suffers from the same formulaic songwriting as Honour Valour Pride, just less so and with better vocals – except Armageddon Bound, because seriously, what the fuck happened there, and why hasn’t anyone ever asked Karl about this?

5. War Master

This was my first Bolt Thrower album, and it’ll always have a special place in my heart for that reason alone. When I listen to it these days, I’m mostly struck by how well it’s put together as a whole album. Everything seems to build like towards the title track as the album’s climax, followed by the two more melodic songs at the end as its dénouement. Also, this album has The Shreds of Sanity, it has Destructive Infinity (except Digby “Lip Licker” Pearson decided to mangle the vinyl version by ripping the best track out of its center), it has Cenotaph, Profane Creation, and of course the title track.

But it’s also kind of an awkward middle child. It’s basically the Number of the Beast in Bolt Thrower’s catalog (okay, nobody’s going to agree with my analogy here, but bear with me) – they had clearly perfected their previous style with Realm of Chaos and were now trying something new, but it wasn’t quite working yet. The guitar tone is too thin, going way too far the other way from the previous album, a lot of the songs have the same plodding, nondescript passages that only seem to be there to fill time that Realm had, just without the not-really-blastbeats, and Andy Whale’s drumming couldn’t carry their new more groove-oriented style yet. It’s a great album, but compared to what came later, it’s just a bit awkward and you can hear the growing pains.

4. Realm of Chaos

This one, on the other hand, knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with perfection. I know the band probably wouldn’t agree with me, but the more time has passed since the release of War Master and Realm of Chaos, the more I’ve come to think Realm of Chaos was the perfection of the old and War Master was the imperfect beginning of the new.

The thing with Realm of Chaos is that as sloppy and sometimes weird and definitely, well, chaotic as it is, I wouldn’t change a thing about it. The ridiculously excessive down-tuning and the guitar tone that results in, the constant push and pull between the awesome riffage and the sloppy mess it always eventually collapses into and that really seems to be basically the same riff over and over, Andy Whale’s hectic drumming – it’s all equal parts silly and genius, and the complete lack of self-awareness makes it all even better. And that’s before you realize it’s basically a concept album about Warhammer 40,000.

And make no mistake, I’m not saying I like this album ironically, I fucking love every second of it, and I listen to it all the time. Go listen to the opening riff of “Through the Eye of Terror” and tell me again how this album is somehow not up to snuff with the rest of the band’s catalog. Yeah, I don’t need to go to “World Eater” to make my point here. Realm of Chaos is Bolt Thrower’s Killers. It’s so good at what it is, they pretty much had to do a complete course correction afterwards.

3. Mercenary

In many ways, Mercenary is where Bolt Thrower peaked. It’s not my personal favorite (although with these top 3, it’s really close), but it’s the last album where they truly evolved stylistically, and as such, it’s a total success and also far and away their most underrated album.

Maybe people didn’t like it because it followed the crunchy phase of The IVth Crusade and its lesser cousin …For Victory by steering the band decidedly back towards a cleaner sound and more developed and refined melodic parts. At the time, I was still a much bigger fan of War Master than I am now, so the cleaner guitar tone didn’t bother me, and I still think the melodic stuff here is probably the best they ever did. More importantly, though, it’s balanced with some of the best kill-riffs in the band’s repertoire. I could pick out any number of songs, but nowhere is this more evident than in “Laid to Waste,” easily a top 3 contender for my favorite Bolt Thrower song of all time. While the title track is mostly carried by one of the better incarnations of what I call the Tank Treads Riff, “Laid to Waste” starts with a couple of melodic parts whose distinct rhythm you don’t quite pick up on the first time you listen to it until you realize that it’s not the melody, but the rhythm that the song is actually built on when, you know, that riff finally kicks in at about the 3:10 mark and, erm, lays waste to it all. Mercenary seems to be the clean-cut melodic album, but it actually has the best groove riffs.

2. Those Once Loyal

Those Once Loyal is really basically a perfect album, and I feel like the only thing I need to explain is why it’s not my #1, even though it has “Salvo,” maybe my favorite Bolt Thrower song and definitely the one with my favorite lyric line. You know which one.

See, I have this theory about what happens when the truly creative musicians finally run out of ideas (and they all do eventually); at that point in their careers, some pull all of their previous ideas together one last time, polish them up, maybe better than ever before, and deliver what I call the retrospective album. Think Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, or Horrorhammer by Abscess.

That’s what Those Once Loyal is, and that’s why the band wisely hung it up afterwards. It does everything the previous albums did, it does a lot of it better, it has the best production the band ever had, but it also doesn’t do anything new. If you want to say that this is peak Bolt Thrower because it contains everything you ever loved about them in its most refined and polished form, I have zero problems with that. But my favorite is one of the ones where they were still trying new things.

1. The IVth Crusade

For a long time now, I’ve had this gut feeling that one day, when enough time had passed, I would come to the conclusion that The IVth Crusade is my favorite Bolt Thrower album. And today, my friends, today is that day.

This album does absolutely everything right. After the weirdly thin guitar tone of War Master, they brought back the crunchy guitar tone here, but more purposefully than on Realm of Chaos, they did their first experimentation with more melodic and catchy parts, and Andy Whale turned in by far the best performance of his time with the band.

And almost as importantly, it’s all new and fresh and none of it feels formulaic. Every song is different, from “Ritual” that almost starts like the aforementioned “Through the Eye of Terror” to the heavily melodic “Where Next to Conquer” or the almost mournful “Celestial Sanctuary”, this one has more variety than any other Bolt Thrower album, but the powerful production ties it all together into a cohesive whole.

And this may be pretty subjective, but it also just doesn’t have any filler. I’ve never really understood why the band was so enamored with “Spearhead” at the time, but other than that, just looking at the track list for The IVth Crusade always makes me a little giddy. I love every song on this thing. The other albums all have standout favorites for me, many of which I’ve named here, but with The IVth Crusade, I really couldn’t tell you. My favorite is whichever happens to be playing at any given moment.

And that’s it, folks, that’s my definitive ranking that I’ll probably regret as soon as I post this, of the discography of one of my favorite bands of all time. Bolt Thrower never made a truly bad album, and all things considered, they stopped recording after exactly the right one. And while it’s complete coincidence, it’s also pretty great that it was exactly eight studio albums, like the chaos symbol they’ve been using ever since they almost became Games Workshop’s mascot band. The Bolt Thrower discography is truly a work of art as a whole, and if they’re true to their word and never get back together, that’ll be their legacy. It really doesn’t get any better than that.