Review of Mad Aleister - Throne of the Dark / Crisis / Memos for Another Day

I wasn't sure what to make of the “Anarchy Metal” tag at first. You see enough bands inventing their own little genre names to know that this can go either way. Sometimes it actually tells you something. Sometimes it just means somebody didn't want to write “heavy metal” in the bio.

With Mad Aleister, the three singles make the idea a bit easier to understand.

The band is built around Allan Johnson, Scott Wark, Armin Kamal and James Kane, all coming from the Canadian metal underground, with Johnson's Exciter history obviously being the name most people will notice first. Scott and James come from Joe Thrasher, while Armin is from Infrared. The Bandcamp description throws speed, thrash and death metal into the same bag and calls the result Anarchy Metal. Fine. After three songs, I wouldn't argue with it too much.

The first one, “Throne of the Dark”, is probably the easiest entry point. I immediately heard the Painkiller-era Judas Priest connection in it!

“Throne of the Dark” is also the song where the whole Exciter connection is going to be hanging over the listener's head whether Mad Aleister like it or not. Put Allan Johnson's name on a new metal band and people are going to listen for that history. There is no escaping it.

But there is a funny detail here which is worth mentioning. The recording of “Throne of the Dark” isn't simply the current four-piece lineup. Daniel Dekay contributes part of the lead solo and Rik Charron plays drums. The track was released on February 15, 2026.

So this first single is really a starting point rather than a perfect photograph of the band as it stands now.

“Crisis” is where the picture gets a little less predictable. Allan Johnson later described the three songs as having different kinds of darkness: “Throne of the Dark” going for the classic and threatening heavy-metal side, “Crisis” reflecting the chaos of the present world, and “Memos for Another Day” being more inward and psychological.

I actually prefer that explanation to trying to force the three songs into one neat genre description. Because why should they sound exactly the same?

Scott has already said that he isn't sticking to one vocal approach in Mad Aleister, and Armin's presence gives the band another guitarist and another vocalist to work with. The musicians themselves have been pretty open about the fact that they don't want to put a fence around the material. Classic metal, speed, thrash and whatever else works. That's basically the whole idea.

Then we get “Memos for Another Day”, and even the title feels different from the first two.

This is the shortest of the three, at 2:53, and lyrically it goes into a much more personal dark place. The lyrics talk about fear, demons, death and losing hope. There isn't much subtlety in the wording, but that's not necessarily what this kind of metal needs.

What I find more interesting is that Allan himself has said he sees these three songs as only a short taste of what Mad Aleister are doing. He also explained that the band originally intended to put the three singles together with another song as an EP, but dropped that plan because the rest of the material was coming together quickly enough to make a full album the better option.

And that's probably where my curiosity about this band really starts.

Three songs aren't enough to tell whether “Anarchy Metal” is going to become a useful description or just something attached to the first press kit. But they are enough to show that Mad Aleister aren't simply trying to recreate one particular chapter of anybody's past.

That's important with a lineup like this.

There is an obvious temptation to look at Allan Johnson and immediately turn Mad Aleister into an Exciter story. I don't think that's particularly interesting. Exciter already exists. Mad Aleister is supposed to be the new band.

The three singles at least give them some room to prove that.

“Throne of the Dark” gets the door open. “Crisis” pushes things somewhere else. “Memos for Another Day” goes darker and more inward. None of this requires a new genre to be invented, and thankfully the band doesn't seem particularly worried about proving that it has invented one.

They've got songs. They've got a lot more of them apparently coming together. Now I want to hear the record.

That's the point where the real test starts!

https://madaleister.bandcamp.com/music

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61562350696533