Glory of Kings “Roots of the Past” Album Review by Antoine Karam

Sep 10, 2026

I came to Glory of Kings the way a lot of people my age will: through a band that stopped existing before most of the internet did. Sacred Warrior made four records between 1988 and 1991 that meant an enormous amount to a very specific kind of listener, and I was one of them. So the arrival of a debut album built substantially from Sacred Warrior songs that never got made is not, for me, a neutral event. Roots of the Past is the rare record where the title is not a theme at all. It is a manifest.

That distinction matters more than it might appear, and it is the key to everything that follows. Guitarist and band leader Jonathan Johnson has been open that several of these songs were written decades ago in the hope of appearing on a Sacred Warrior album that never materialized. This is therefore not a band drawing on the past for inspiration. It is a band recording the past directly, exhuming material that has been sitting in a drawer since the Clinton administration and finally giving it a body. Every strength and every weakness this album has flows from that single fact, and any review that treats it as a conventional 2026 debut is measuring the wrong thing.

The lineup reads like a deliberate act of restoration. Alongside Johnson, vocalist Erik Schilling and bassist Steve Watkins are both Sacred Warrior alumni, with Whitecross drummer Michael Feighan completing the recording lineup. Three quarters of a band that dissolved thirty-five years ago, reassembled around songs it never got to finish. Whatever else you make of the result, the intent is unusually pure. There is no attempt here to chase a contemporary sound, no producer brought in to modernize the edges, no gesture toward whatever prog-power is supposed to sound like this decade.

Where the approach pays off most handsomely is in the riffcraft. Mindwar announces the record properly, arriving with double-kick urgency and a guitar figure that keeps returning across the track like a recurring character, and Fairy Tales brings a heavier, more dramatic swing that recalls the theatrical end of American metal rather than the technical one. Johnson has clearly lost nothing; the lead playing across the album is fluent, unshowy where it needs to be, and genuinely thrilling when it opens up. If you came for the guitar, this record delivers on every promise the lineup implies.

The title track is the strongest thing here and, tellingly, the one that sounds least like an excavation. Roots of the Past moves across a genuinely wide dynamic range, uses piano and keyboard textures with real purpose rather than as background wash, and earns its progressive label through structure rather than length. The Mystery works a similar seam, opening on string synths and a beautifully judged clean guitar tone before it builds. These two tracks suggest a version of this band that is writing forward rather than backward, and they are the most compelling argument for a second album.

The record’s most divisive quality is its pacing, and here the excavation shows its seams. Roots of the Past carries three instrumental interludes across eleven tracks, and their placement repeatedly interrupts momentum just as it accumulates. Gathering Storm works well enough as a cinematic overture that hands off cleanly into Mindwar. Foreshadows, built on sitar and a Phrygian-dominant melodic line for an eastern feel, is more interesting in isolation than in sequence, particularly since it houses some of the best soloing on the album. Whether you experience these as thoughtful album architecture or as padding will depend almost entirely on whether you still listen to records front to back.

Erik Schilling is the other point of genuine disagreement, and I want to be careful here rather than glib. His phrasing and tone sit exactly where a Sacred Warrior devotee would want them to sit, and on the title track and Mindwar the resemblance to a certain school of dramatic American metal singing is unmistakable and welcome. Elsewhere the harmony arrangements make choices that do not entirely settle against the music beneath them, most noticeably on Gods and Men and again on closer The Waiting Game. There is also a case that the final mix has not served him as well as it might. Reasonable listeners have landed in very different places on this, and I do not think either camp is hearing wrong.

One thing should be stated plainly rather than danced around: this is unambiguously a confessional record, and it does not modulate. The lyrics are explicit about their worldview throughout, and on Occam’s Razor in particular they turn outward and argumentative in a way that will land very differently depending on where the listener stands. I mention it not as a criticism but as information, because it genuinely shapes who this album is for. Plenty of bands have carried an overt faith into wide acclaim on the strength of the songwriting alone; whether Roots of the Past reaches past its natural audience will come down to whether the material is strong enough to carry listeners who do not share its premises. On the best four or five tracks, I think it is.

So does the excavation succeed? Largely, yes, with clear limits. Roots of the Past recaptures the specific feel of late-eighties American Christian prog-power with a fidelity that no amount of studied revivalism could fake, for the simple reason that it is not revivalism. These are the actual songs, played by most of the actual people. That authenticity is the album’s great asset and also the source of everything held against it, because material written for 1991 sounds like material written for 1991. You cannot have the one without the other, and I would rather have this than a polished compromise that pleased nobody.

In conclusion, this is a record with a narrow but real claim on greatness and a wider claim on affection. The title track alone justifies the project, Jonathan Johnson proves that three decades away cost him nothing, and the whole thing is assembled with a cohesion that far too many debuts lack. It is also uneven, occasionally lethargic in its second half, and structurally hampered by interludes it does not need. Those who arrive as Sacred Warrior partisans will find the closure they have waited thirty-five years for. Those arriving cold will find a solid, sincere prog-power album with four excellent songs and several that merely occupy space. Both reactions are correct, which is a stranger and more interesting outcome than most debut albums manage.

Final Thoughts: My favourites are the title track Roots of the Past, which is the one I would play for someone who had never heard the band, Mindwar for sheer opening-statement conviction, and The Mystery for its restraint. Two further observations. First, the keyboards are among the most effective elements on this album and no keyboardist is credited in the lineup, which is a curious omission for a record that leans on synth and piano textures as heavily as this one does. Second, the songs stay within conventional running times despite their progressive leanings, and I suspect that discipline is why the album coheres as well as it does. If there is a future here, and I hope there is, I would like to hear this band write eleven new songs rather than finish eleven old ones.

Purchase / stream Roots of the Past: Bandcamp | Roxx Records

Rating: 7/10

Glory of Kings Roots of the Past album cover artwork

Album: Roots of the Past
Artist: Glory of Kings
Type: Debut full-length
Label: Roxx Records (US) / No Dust Records (Europe)
Released: August 14th, 2026 (worldwide, Roxx). European CD and digital September 4th, 2026 via No Dust Records; vinyl to follow in November 2026.