Judas Priest
50 Heavy Metal Years Of Music SONY
Priest celebrate their half-century with a career-spanning metal blow-out.
Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, but Judas Priest drove it forward, rapidly accelerating the genre’s development. The limited-edition isn’t their first rodeo at the box-set ranch, but in comparison with 2004’s 4-disc and ’ (2012) vanilla round-up and omission of the Ripper Owens period, this 42-CD behemoth hits the motherlode. All 18 studio albums and six live long-players are here, including their previously deleted Ripperfronted output. For die-hards, there are eight newly mastered live shows (five previously unreleased) recorded between 1979 and 1991, offering full-throttle classics, a theme continued on ’s collection of buried gems (including unreleased epic ).
