No doubt the most pleasant surprise of the year. After a lackluster, paint-by-the-numbers album in 2017, the Canadian bashers Striker quickly returned with Play To Win, and what a breath of fresh air it was for these heavy metal maniacs. Taking some chances with their songwriting, Play To Win showcases a synth-back ballad “Standing Alone” and a track that could belong to an ‘80s movie (“Hands Of Time”). Nevertheless, there are scorchers like “Summoner”, the sleek “Heart Of Lies”, and the catchy “On The Run”. This album establishes Dan Cleary as one of the best metal vocalists of the past decade and if you’ve slept on these guys before, now is the time to jump aboard the Striker speed wagon. Play To Win is energetic, outstanding heavy metal that proudly wears their influences and rightfully earns its spot at #4.

“We wanted to try some new things with this album”, explains Tim Brown to BW scribe Nick Balazs in a feature. “We write a ton of music so it sort of gets boring to work on the same types of songs over and over and over. We felt as though we kind of reached the limit of what we could do with sort of those sounds that we'd been relying on like, and it was like well, let's try some new stuff and see what happens. I mean, we're huge fans of all kinds of bands that have those kinds of songs. I mean, if you look at bands like Metallica or Scorpions, Skid Row, whatever, their biggest songs are always the ballads. Metallica, ‘Nothing Else Matters’, just a monster song, a huge song. You have to be dynamic in your writing. You have to have the soft, you have to have the hard and have the heavy with the light. And so it's all about balance.”

“We’re stuck in a van for way too long (laughs), for thousands of hours and there's no better way to kill time by just putting on some tunes,” he says. We were on tour with Dark Tranquillity and for whatever reason on that tour we got super big into Toto. So there's a lot of those sort of influences on the album. But like I said, at the same time we're also listening to, you know, put on the Toto and then after the Toto is done put on some like super brutal death metal and just rock out to that. We wanted to have an album that sort of had a song from every kind of influence that we have, which is kind of hard to limit yourself, but try to make each song sort of unique.”