Review by Vinny for DevilDriver - Strike and Kill (2026)

An artist that I have somehow missed (or perhaps subconsciously avoided) up until now, Devildriver stomped late into my weekly listening after many years of total neglect. The initial four songs on Strike and Kill do indeed land with a deadly accuracy, their thrashing grooves leaving little room for breath in fact. ‘Dead in the Water’ marginally steals the run on the title track as being the standout of the opening salvo of tracks. The track has a ferocious nature to it that is just so infectious, that it becomes near impossible to ignore after one listen. Groove metal rarely moves me, but I would put Strike and Kill on a par with the last Exhorder album in terms of unexpected entertainment levels.

Unlike Exhorder however, Devildriver have always had a penchant for dipping into the wider metal genre pool and just as I start to get all carried away with myself, elements of melodic metalcore/melodic death metal start to appear from ‘In the Moonlight’ onwards. These moments do go a long way to breaking up some of the repetition of the album, since even within the more positively received opening track listing it does suffer from Machine Head like predictability creeping into the edges. Whilst it is hard to call them disruptive, these moments do blunt the attack somewhat in what is clearly aligned to be an “in your face” type of record. Lyrically things are a bit hit and miss also at times but the guitar playing is a clear cut above everything else (yuck, clicky drums).

Whilst I almost expected a decline in quality over the second half of the album, there is an argument to say that fear is never fully realised. If anything, the albums lull is in the middle section over tracks seven through ten, with there being a marked recovery to get us to the end of the record. The superb blast of fury that is ‘Oath of Iron’ is completely unexpected and that track alone manages to fully steer the album back into my repeat plays list for the future. I am not going to pretend that this is album of the year material by any means, which is fine because I don’t get the impression that this is why Jez and co released the record in the first place. However, I can’t get away from the fact that this is an infectious affair, full of riffs and tantalising melodies on the leads that I have just lapped up for the last forty-eight-hours.