REVIEW: GRAVE DIGGER – BONE COLLECTOR (2025)

Grave Digger reckons this one is “going back to their roots”—and to be fair, you might as well on your 45th anniversary, right?

Those, though, are mere words; it’s harder to do in practice, but to be fair to them, the four of them have hitched up their jeans with their studded belts and meant it.

“Bone Collector”—the song and thus the album—takes about 10 seconds to get into its metal groove, and okay, if you know exactly what’s going to happen, it doesn’t make it any less fun.

“The Rich, the Poor, the Dying” offers “money for nothing and death for free,” and in fairness to Grave Digger, they are heavier than most of the competition. If not power metal, then powerful for sure.

“Kingdom of Skulls” boasts a stunning solo, and the thought that they just love this metal life is written large all the way through the brilliant “The Devil’s Serenade.”

And that joy is sort of infectious. Like, you know what “Killing Is My Pleasure” is going to sound like, but it doesn’t make it any worse.

There’s a surprise on “Mirror of Hate,” though, when the growls appear, but it is back to fists in the air all the way on “Riders of Doom,” although Chris Boltendahl does somehow manage to sing these with a little more menace than normal.

This is the first album in Grave Digger’s long career without keyboards, and it’s one of the heaviest I’ve heard in their canon. “Made of Madness” thunders like the purest of thrash—just listen to the double kick drumming of Marcus Kniep.

Just because you’ve been around for years doesn’t mean you have to be trad, mind you. “Graveyard Kings” is tougher than their peers, and a clue perhaps comes on “Forever Evil and Buried Alive,” where the hook reckons they’re “reborn in rage,” and as Boltendahl has produced, mixed, and mastered it, you’d imagine it’s his vision for Grave Digger 2025.

The last one, “Whispers of the Damned,” is an epic type of ballad that you can imagine Maiden (or perhaps Blaze Bayley) doing. “The banality of evil is a grim reality” goes the hook here.

But the fact remains that even after 40-plus years of Grave Digger, they haven’t done anything banal once, and they damn sure don’t here, either. They’ve always been heavy and always been metal; here, though, they’ve made it more raw than usual.

Rating 8/10