Much of the material featured on ‘Killer Elite’ will be heard live when DragonForce return to the road in 2016. C’mon, power metal recognised by the Grammies… who’d have believed it?” “I’m not saying that we changed the world of music, and there were plenty of people who hated us for it, but to have a song with so many guitar solos breaking out of the underground to reach a new audience, I saw that as a good thing. Though the band lost out to Metallica at the Grammies, the guitarist remains thrilled and a little vindicated that DragonForce were able to step out of their own little kingdom and into another where different rules and expectations applied. Casual listeners might learn that quite a few of our songs are actually very catchy.” “Our last two albums, the ones featuring Marc, were a little more varied than what had gone before and we also released singles that weren’t necessarily fast songs. “I like to think that this collection displays quite a lot of diversity, we tried to make it as broad-based as possible,” Li continues. DragonForce are not merely about relentless tempos and flashy solos. Although a notch or two heavier, ‘Starfire’, a song that first appeared on the band’s debut, ‘Valley Of The Damned’, isn’t too far removed from that same area. Lifted from the album ‘Sonic Firestorm’, said track isn’t alone in entering lighter-waving, stadium-friendly territory. “Because we like to play fast, some people might be a little surprised to hear our ballad,” Herman chuckles, referring to ‘Dawn Over A New World’. If it’s the only DragonForce song you’re aware of – excusable, since it showed up in several best-selling video games, including Guitar Hero, and at the last count had shifted more than a million copies in the US alone – and you’re expecting all the rest to sound identical, well… that’s another good reason to validate ‘Killer Elite’s existence. Li insists that its runaway success has been more of a blessing than a curse, and of course he’s correct. The aforementioned ‘Through The Fire And Flames’ looms above DragonForce like a brightly coloured neon sign. This is something for those that perhaps don’t know every single song from every single album.” “But it gives a strong flavour of everything that we’ve released so far. “It’s a mix of the songs that the guys in the band like to play, and also choices that the fans – the older ones – tell us are their favourites,” Li says of the selection process. Whether it’s a crash course in DragonForce that you seek, or you’re a veteran fan that simply craves their very essence distilled down onto two discs, ‘Killer Elite’ fits the bill. So this is a chance for them to get into some of our biggest and best tracks from the albums that predate the current era.” They’re not familiar at all with our earliest stuff.
#DRAGONFORCE BEST SONGS PLUS#
“For Sam and myself, who’ve been there since the beginning, it’s a little strange to meet fans who’ve attended a DragonForce show and only know the songs from the albums we did with Marc, plus our biggest hit ‘Through The Fire And Flames’. “Marc has now been in the band for quite a while, and the fans have really taken to him,” Herman Li explains. This latter fact partially explains the existence of the collection that you hold in your hand. ‘Maximum Overload’ was also the second release to feature Marc Hudson, the singer who joined them in 2011. 2014’s ‘Maximum Overload’ was the sixth studio album of a career that brought them a Grammy Award nomination in 2008. The DragonForce sound is as exciting as it is unmistakable, and the band’s willingness to tour around the globe has paid off handsomely.
The line-up was gradually completed by musicians from various countries, their cosmopolitan pedigrees adding extra colour and texture to a style that mixed thrash- and speed-metal with power-metal, performed with high quality musicianship and blessed by a strong, stirring melodic undercurrent. The band was formed in October 1999 by London-based twin guitar shredders Herman Li and Sam Totman, who used the name DragonHeart for two years. A special edition adds a third disc collating all seven of the band’s promotional videos, plus an additional live track. ‘Killer Elite’ offers almost two hours and 20 minutes of music, its 21 tracks, which include a smattering of concert material, touching upon the group’s entire repertoire. DragonForce, the long running, hugely popular extreme power metal band, release their first ever ‘best-of’ collection on XXX XXXX, 2016.
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