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This is a somewhat misleading title for this album as my first thought was that this was a compilation. No, this is a brand-new album and with a surprisingly short length of under 35 minutes. Considering there's no filler here, I'd rather have that than an extra 5-10 minutes that may not be up to par. Anyway. I've sampled some of this band's material before and it never really grabbed me. 40 Years of Metal, however, contains a lot of stuff that's right up my alley. Heavy melodic songs, no ballads, lots of speed, crunchy guitars, more catchiness than you can shake a stick at; in other words: the works. This is quite old school, albeit with a clean modern production that thankfully doesn't neuter their hard-edged sound. A lot of this is anthemic, the kind of stuff that gets people moving and singing and even after the first listen I had a good chunk of the album stuck in my head already, especially the title track and "No War Symphony." The clean vocals are melodic but also aggressive and a good fit for the heavy, crunchy metal on display here. Lots of shouting, so this is an album that certainly won't shut up your friends who are always complaining about metal singers shouting ("fuck off, weakling" is the right answer). It's on the short side, but 40 Years of Metal is, simply put, a really cool album of '80s-style heavy metal.