It’s difficult not to like Rob Halford, the prima donna-voiced frontman of Birmingham metal stalwarts Judas Priest. One of the few openly gay figures in heavy music, Halford has long been coaxing generations of misanthropic straight men into head-to-toe leather as a sign of their virility, while bringing Queen-style operatics to songs laden with devil’s-trident riffs and double-bass drum. A year before coming out in 1998, he performed ‘Breaking The Law’, Priest’s most famous song, with queercore band Pansy Division. In a 2020 interview he approved of the track being played over stolen NYPD radios by George Floyd protestors.

What of Invincible Shield, the group’s first studio album in six years? Perhaps its most striking feature to anyone not versed in their back catalogue is the political slant of several tracks, including opener ‘Panic Attack’. A longtime US resident, Halford has previously described the social messaging of his lyrics as ‘concealed by smoke and mirrors.’ But the smoke is pretty thin around lines like ‘the clamour and the clatter of incensed keys / can bring a nation to its knees / on the wings of a lethal icon, bird of prey / it’s a sign of the times when bedlam rules / when the masses condone pompous fools.’

Here and elsewhere (see the title track and mid-paced banger ‘Devil In Disguise’) there are references to online misinformation, barricades and walls, and populist demagogues. Halford stated his opposition to Donald Trump in 2018, citing an intolerance of LGBT+ communities, so is it fanciful to consider this release a clarion call ahead of the upcoming US elections?

In any case, Halford has described Invincible Shield as relatively musically adventurous, with more freewheeling guitar solos (there are lots of those) and less reliance on verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. The album is overlong and feels more like a collection of individual songs than a coherent whole, but it packs a punch and induces a head-nodding trance in several places. And again, who wouldn’t love Rob Halford?

Invincible Shield is released by Columbia Records on Friday 8 March; Judas Priest are on tour Saturday 2–Thursday 21 March; main picture: James Hodges.