Exclusive Album Stream: Striker’s Bombastic ’80s Metal Homage, Play to Win

Given Striker’s proprietary brew of traditional heavy metal riffery, ’80s hair singalong choruses, power metal bombast and Shrapnel Records shred, it’d be tempting to classify them as a retro act. To some extent that’s true — these guys love and worship all things ’80s metal — but the band’s dedication to modern production aesthetics has kept them in the conversation of exciting up-and-coming bands. It’s fine to be only retro, but it’ll only take you so far, ya know?

No wonder, then, that MS scribe Jeff Treppel chose their 2017 self-titled affair as his pick for our annual “Albums That Will Fuck Your Face Off” series, our early-year column highlighting lesser-known acts whose new albums we expect to… well, you get the point. And it’s no wonder that even before that we premiered a video for their track “Phoenix Lights.” Shit, even Taco Bell is on board now: they just awarded the band membership to their esteemed Feed the Beat program!

All that’s a very long-winded way of seeing we’re excited to be premiering Striker’s brand new album Play to Win, which might be their most balanced effort yet. It’s their most catchy, too: the likelihood you’ll be singing along with every song before they finish is very, very high.

Check it out below. Play to Win comes out on Breaking Records this Friday, October 26th; pre-order here