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After being a reviewer for a few years, you start running into bands multiple times as they release new material. Often, this is greeted with excitement, but a real clunker can have me looking for something else rather than potentially subjecting my ears to another painful experience. Pressure is a Swedish band whose first two albums I found terrible, so why am I reviewing their latest, Heroes Will Fall? One, it's an EP, so that diminishes the potential for suffering and two, it's sort of a battle of wills between me and the band, a kind of "if you're going to keep releasing questionable music, I'm going to keep reviewing it." A challenge, in other words.

Lo and behold, Heroes Will Fall is not nearly as putrid as Path of a Shadow or In a Dark Heart We Trust. There are no random, interminably long spoken word parts and the music is more focused, sticking to a hard rock/heavy metal formula throughout the five tracks. Songs like "Demonic Oath," with its sultry vocal lines and menacing vibe, and "Demon Huntress" (all the tracks on this release are stories told from the side of demons), which varies the vocal styles to add some character to the song, are fine, even if the riff on the latter is eerily similar to the one from Motörhead's "Deaf Forever." "Demon Warrior" has a sort of Neptune Power Federation feel with accessible songwriting and dark lyrical content, perfectly serviceable if you like that style, and the only real dud is "My Old Dagger" where the male singer takes the microphone. This one has a weird, Running-Wild-on-acid feel, and doesn't really work, though it isn't actively offensive. So, there you have it, a decent release from Pressure. Maybe this is a turning point for these Swedes, but don't be fooled into plumbing the depths of their back catalog just because this one isn't awful.