MetalClassic Rock
Reigning Phoenix Music · 24 July 2026
The album opens with Stan Bush singing “The Touch”, the same song he sang in 1986, here running exactly four minutes. The voice arrives intact, the high notes in place, and what has changed is everything underneath: thicker guitars and a production that pushes far harder than the original. He returns on track four with “Dare”, which brings in Vince DiCola as a guest.
DiCola wrote the film’s score, and he is the other name holding the operation up. “Death Of Optimus Prime” is credited to DiCola himself, four minutes and forty-two seconds, and stays funereal and cinematic. “Autobot/Decepticon Battle”, by contrast, is rebuilt by the house band, and that is where the symphonic and progressive elements of the original score turn into a band piece.
The house band is The Knights of Unicron: Matt Harvey, Gus Rios and Ross Sewage, with a different guest on each song. Brittney Slayes (Unleash the Archers) takes the series theme that Lion made famous; Mark Osegueda (Death Angel) takes “Hunger”, which belonged to Kick Axe; Sebastian Bach handles “Nothin’s Gonna Stand In Our Way”; Francesco Cavalieri (Wind Rose) takes N.R.G.’s “Instruments of Destruction”, which is track two. The record closes with “Dare To Be Stupid”, the “Weird Al” Yankovic parody, sung here by Torch.
The 1986 LP had six artists from six different worlds lined up one after another with no attempt to make them fit together: a Weird Al song next to a Kick Axe song. The new edition keeps all ten songs and runs them through the same filter, with the same rhythm section and the same guitar sound. Through the middle stretch it is hard to tell one song from the next except by the voice, and what made the original strange has gone.
Ten tracks, thirty-nine minutes, released by Reigning Phoenix Music on 24 July 2026. The 1986 soundtrack remains in print separately.
Rating: 6.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill