Warlord

1 festival played →

Cult US power metal from the early '80s, revered far more for a small run of recordings than for any road history — melodic, near-mythic heavy metal with a devoted following.

Warlord formed in California in the early 1980s when guitarist and songwriter William J. Tsamis moved from San Jose to Los Angeles with drummer Mark Zonder, later of Fates Warning. The pair caught the attention of Metal Blade founder Brian Slagel, who placed them on his early Metal Massacre compilations with the tracks "Lucifer's Hammer" and "Mrs. Victoria" before signing the band outright.

Warlord recorded rather than toured, issuing the six-song EP Deliver Us in 1983 to notice from publications such as Kerrang!. The band's only live performance, staged at the Raymond Theatre, was filmed and recorded without an audience and released as the album And the Cannons of Destruction Have Begun the following year, alongside a VHS of the same show. Members performed under stage names such as Destroyer and Thunderchild.

Their music combined twin-guitar melodic writing, neoclassical phrasing and a grand, almost liturgical tone, with lyrics drawing on myth and religious imagery. Largely overlooked at the time, the recordings acquired a strong following among collectors of American power metal.

Trouble holding down a vocalist wore the band down, and Warlord folded in 1986, with Tsamis relocating to Florida and undergoing a spiritual conversion. Metal Blade issued compilation collections in the years after, including an expanded Best of Warlord in 1989. Tsamis later revived the Warlord name for further releases in subsequent decades; he died in 2021.

Read more