BRAVE NEW WORLD

Although the return of Bruce Dickinson to Iron Maiden is something to cherish, Brave New World is equally special for offering the return of Adrian Smith. Indeed, arguably it's Smith's departure after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, rather than Bruce quitting after Fear of the Dark, which really marked the beginning of the band's mid-career slump, because whilst the Blaze Bayley era is often derided it isn't as though the two Smith-less albums featuring Bruce on vocals were top-flight additions to the Maiden discography.

As it stands, Brave New World feels like the band picking up where they left off after Seventh Son, as though the intervening albums were just a bad dream. The expanded three-guitar lineup gives the band confidence to get back to more complex song structures and lavish, layered arrangements which they may otherwise have struggled to reproduce live, whilst Bruce sounds as fresh as ever. I wouldn't quite call it a classic, but I certainly like it better than Somewhere In Time, and that means it deserves to be embraced in the Maiden canon.