Okay so here is the thing about Shadowfaxxx that nobody with a press pass and a head full of Quaaludes seems willing to admit: they are REAL, man, realer than anything that’s come out of the Riddermark since the last time anybody bothered to mean what they were screaming, and I say this having sat through enough arena rock horseshit in the past decade to make Artaud himself weep into his mead. Shadowfaxxx, I am here to tell you, are here after storming down out of the plains of Edoras with their hair flying and their overblown choruses locked and loaded.

The influences, sure, you hear them: the bombastic, fist-pumping four-on-the-floor gallop rhythms that feel genetically engineered for cavalry charges, the riffs that squeal like horses in a thunderstorn, and the kind of sincerity that would embarrass a lesser band into ironic self-distancing. Shadowfaxxx refuse to self-distance, they refuse to wink at you, they grab you by the collar and drag you into the chorus with them, shoulder to shoulder, absolutely committed to the notion that this moment, THIS moment right here, is worth dying for, or at least worth spilling your drink over.

And the lyrics, Christ, the lyrics hit Rohan in the heart. Deep love in every line, they pivot between being about a trusted comrade, a lifelong love and a particularly magnificent horse, sometimes within the same verse, and the band registers absolutely zero interest in clarifying which is which, because what matters, what has ALWAYS mattered in the calculus of rock and roll truth, is not the object of the feeling but the feeling itself, dialled all the way up, sweaty flanks heaving, trumpets roaring, the thundering of hooves into the certain death of battle.

Ride Until the Light Breaks and Fires on the Ridgeline are not subtle songs. They are not trying to be subtle songs. They are trying to be the sound of two hundred riders cresting a hill at dawn into the blast of a horn that could wake the dead, and on those terms, on THOSE terms, which are the only terms that count. they succeed completely, magnificently, and without apology, which is more than I can say for half the acts on the mead hall circuit currently armored up in aesthetic distance and calling it art.

Live, it is less a concert than a collective act of hallucination: the hair moves, the arms go up, the horizons multiply, and somewhere in the strobed chaos you realize this band is not in on the joke and frankly, brother, neither are you anymore, because the joke was always the armor and they burned it, they burned it down in the first chorus and now all that’s left is the noise and the night and the feeling of moving at speed toward something that may or may not be waiting.

Shadowfaxxx aren’t writing songs about war. They are writing songs about charging toward it with total aesthetic conviction and absolutely immaculate hair, and if you can’t respect that, then I genuinely don’t know why you came.