AUDREY HORNE Youngblood CD (2013)

Norway has a complicated relationship with rock music. For every bleak, trebly black metal act screaming into the void, there's a band like Audrey Horne quietly making the case that Norwegians can write a hook as sharp as anyone on the planet.

Youngblood, their third album, is where the Bergen outfit fully committed to the melodic hard rock sound they'd been circling since their debut. Big riffs, bigger choruses, and a production sheen that owes more to classic AOR and glam metal than anything from the Oslo black metal inner circle. The band shares members with Enslaved and Gorgoroth, which makes this album feel like a deliberate, gleeful act of heresy. It rules. Thirteen tracks of muscular, radio-ready rock that doesn't apologise for a single power chord.

CD, 2013 pressing. Thirteen tracks.

Fans of: Dio, Whitesnake, pretty much anything your dad had on cassette but better.