Stryper “Throne of Thorns” Album Review by Jorge Pozo

Sep 10, 2026

I should say at the outset that I cannot pretend to neutrality here, and I am not going to try. Stryper are my favourite band, full stop, and have been for as long as I have cared about music at all. I have defended them in arguments I did not need to have. I have owned To Hell With The Devil in four formats. So when Throne of Thorns arrived, their eighteenth studio album and their third in three consecutive years (When We Were Kings (2024), The Greatest Gift of All (2025), Throne of Thorns (2026)), I did what I always do: cleared an evening and put it on properly, the way Stryper has always deserved to be heard. What came back was a band with more left in the tank than anyone has a right to expect at album eighteen.

For forty-three years this band has been underestimated from two directions at once, which is a genuinely unusual fate. Secular metal spent the eighties treating them as a novelty because of the yellow and black and the Bibles thrown into crowds. Parts of the church treated them with suspicion because the guitars were too loud and the hair was too big. Stryper simply outlasted both verdicts by refusing to soften in either direction, and at this distance the argument looks settled. Most of the bands who sneered are gone. This one is still making records, and making them at a rate that should embarrass acts half their age.

That output deserves more attention than it gets. A record every year for three years running is a punishing pace, even with a Christmas album in the middle of it, and it is remarkable for a band whose core has been intact since the beginning. Michael Sweet, Robert Sweet and Oz Fox have been in this together since the start, with Perry Richardson on bass since 2017 and now thoroughly part of the furniture. Continuity like that is rare enough to be worth stating plainly. It is also what allowed them to absorb a complication on this record that would have derailed a younger band entirely.

The title track opens the album and functions as its thesis. Michael Sweet has framed Throne of Thorns around the crown of thorns and the redemption that followed, which gives the record its governing image: something meant as an instrument of humiliation turned into the emblem of a victory. Musically it is exactly the marriage the band have spent their career perfecting, a heavy central riff carrying a chorus that lifts without ever tipping into sentimentality. If you wanted one song to explain what this band is to somebody who has never heard them, this would now be my choice.

Then there is the voice, which remains the most extraordinary thing about Stryper and the hardest to account for. Singers do not usually keep this. Four decades in, Michael Sweet is still moving between full-throated highs and genuine tenderness without any of the hedging that normally creeps into a veteran vocalist’s phrasing. There is a lived-in quality to certain lines here that a younger man simply could not produce, and rather than diminishing the performance it deepens it. He sounds like someone who has earned every note he is reaching for.

Which brings me to the guitars, and to something worth saying carefully. This album was made out of order. A scheduling conflict with the engineer meant the band could not begin with drums as rock records almost always do, so guitars were tracked first, and it was at that point that Oz Fox ran into spikes in his blood pressure severe enough that he could not hold pitch. The parts that have been shared between two players for four decades became Michael Sweet‘s alone. He carried the whole guitar record.

Knowing that changes what you hear, and it should. Those harmonised leads running through Falling, the doubled solo in the same track that is pure old-school pleasure, the bright and almost Judas Priest lift of Here In Your Heart, the finest solo on the album on I’m Alright (I’m Okay): that is one man tracking both halves of a conversation he has spent his entire life having with somebody else. It should sound thinner than it does. It does not sound thin at all, which is either a compliment to his playing or to how deeply he has absorbed his friend’s phrasing, and I suspect it is both.

There is a grace note to all of this that I cannot let pass. When Oz Fox spoke about the finished record, he talked about the heart that went into it, about Michael pouring everything into the music, about Robert‘s power and Perry‘s musicianship, and about being grateful to be on the journey. He said nothing whatsoever about himself. Anyone who has followed this band knows what he has come through over the years, and he remains a member of Stryper in every way that matters. The record is better for his fingerprints on it even where his hands are not.

Some of the most affecting material here faces backwards without ever curdling into nostalgia for its own sake. Hollywood conjures an era that is not coming back, all dreaming hard rock riffs and the particular hunger of a young band with nothing yet to lose. Beautifully Broken is the eighties incarnate, the sound that made teenagers lock their bedroom doors and hold an imaginary microphone. Waiting For You has an openness that genuinely recalls the earliest records, before anybody knew what this band would become. For anyone who grew up with them, these three land somewhere below the ribs.

Underneath all of it, Robert Sweet plays with the sideways-facing swagger that has always been his signature, and the drum sound on this record is superb: clean, forceful, never buried. Perry Richardson anchors everything with a rock bass that understands its job is to serve rather than show off. Alone Again is where the rhythm section does its most interesting work, with additional percussion giving the track an unusual texture and the lead guitars holding back a density that never quite breaks loose. It is one of the more contemporary-sounding things they have recorded.

If anything, the album gets stronger as it goes. Carry The Flame and Alone Again show a band still willing to try textures they have not leaned on before, and then the closing pair arrives and simply takes over. Ashes To Roses is a melodic hymn of genuine emotional weight, simply arranged and all the stronger for it, one of those songs that earns its restraint. Shadowbreaker ends the record as a heavy, chaotic riff-fest that sounds like four men emptying the tank with nothing held in reserve. Closing on the heaviest song on the album is a choice I wholeheartedly endorse, and it leaves you reaching straight for track one again.

In conclusion, Throne of Thorns is a triumph, and I say that with my bias fully declared and my judgement intact. This is a band at forty-three years old writing with conviction, playing with precision, and sounding like they have something left to prove to nobody but themselves. Robert Sweet has called it their best record yet. I will not go quite that far, because To Hell With The Devil is load-bearing for my entire relationship with heavy music, but I understand completely why he feels it. This belongs in the upper tier of everything they have released this century, and for a band this deep into its story that is an achievement bordering on the absurd.

Final Thoughts: My favourites are the title track Throne of Thorns, which I have played more times in the past week than is reasonable, I’m Alright (I’m Okay) for that solo, and Ashes To Roses, which is the one that got me. Three further observations. First, the production is crystalline; every instrument occupies its own space and nothing is smeared together, which matters enormously on a record where one player is stacking every guitar part himself. Learning that the sessions ran backwards, guitars before drums, also explains a certain forward-leaning urgency in the rhythm tracks that I noticed before I knew why it was there. Second, Perry Richardson‘s comment about the best music coming from living and struggling rather than from comfort is the most useful thing anybody in the band has said about this album. Third, and selfishly: they are touring heavily through the autumn, and if they come anywhere near you, go.

Pre-order / stream Throne of Thorns: ffm.bio/stryper-throneofthornsalbum

Rating: 9/10

Stryper Throne of Thorns album cover — Stryper Throne of Thorns cover

Album: Throne of Thorns
Artist: Stryper
Type: Eighteenth studio album
Label: Frontiers Music Srl
Release Date: September 25th, 2026