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This band, one of too many named Imperium, has been active since 2015 but has yet to release a full-length album. This is their third EP in six years and the second in two, so maybe we're inching closer to that milestone.

This is really cool crunchy heavy metal that packs a lot of punch, flirting a bit with thrash albeit without getting too close to that fence. The vocals are clean but on the harsh side, which is a good fit for the music as anything more melodic just wouldn't gel with the aggressive music. A lot of this stuff is rather fast-paced with some machine-gun riffage that certainly gets the head banging and the foot tapping. There's nothing especially new here and if I had a better memory I could point to some old (early 2000s) albums that sounded like this, but When Kings Meet almost sounds fresh because a lot of bands these days are busy doing something else ("new wave of this and that" and other bandwagons), so despite it having been done before, it feels a little different at the current time.

Something I found annoying, the EP ends with live versions of "Capable of Murder" and "When Kings Meet" recorded at Bloodstock Festival 2022. Now, that's not unusual and is usually fine, but here the sound volume drops to something like half (if not less) that of the preceding studio-recorded songs, so these tracks really don't fit. I don't know what they were thinking including these versions on here; makes me wonder if a mistake was made or what. Mind you, that doesn't make the other tracks any less listenable. Good stuff.