Demolition is the fourteenth studio album by British heavy metal band Judas Priest, and the first in the decade of the 2000s. It is the second and final studio album to feature Tim "Ripper" Owens on vocals. It is the only Judas Priest studio album to feature a Parental Advisory label due to some songs featuring profanity: "Machine Man" and "Metal Messiah" both carry explicit markings on the album's iTunes page.
Background and reception
Following the lukewarm-to-decent reception to Jugulator, the band scrambled to assess what exactly went wrong, and determined that fans preferred a sound more faithful to Priest's back catalog. The resulting album would be an amalgam of Jugulator-style riffs, references to '80s Priest, and nu-metal additions such as samples, downtuned guitars, rapping, and industrial-style beats. While the ostensible aim was to offer something for every possible fan, in the end, the album received a much poorer reception than Jugulator by most fans -- and would result in the eventual reunion of the "classic" line-up with Halford. Owens has stated that Demolition was his favorite album that he did with the group, claiming it had "better vocals and more melody" than Jugulator. In 2018 Tim "Ripper" Owens pledged to re-record this album and its predecessor Jugulator as he feels that his era of the band has "been erased". Guitarist Richie Faulkner cites "Hell Is Home" as his favourite song, "It's really heavy and the vocal melody is really great. I think Ripper sings it really well. It's probably one of my favorite Priest songs of the Ripper era. 'Hell Is Home' — I really like that."
The album was produced by guitarist Glenn Tipton, who also took over as the primary songwriter. The band's main songwriting team had long consisted of Rob Halford, K. K. Downing, and Tipton. After Halford departed, however, Downing and Tipton wrote all the songs on Jugulator. On this album, many of the songs were written solely by Tipton, with contributions from Downing on several songs. Former producer Chris Tsangarides, who cowrote "A Touch of Evil" on Painkiller, also assisted in the writing of a few songs. Drummer Scott Travis cowrote "Cyberface" – his first and only contribution to writing in the band's history. This was the first album since Painkiller to feature a guest appearance by keyboardist Don Airey, who had played on "A Touch of Evil." "People will wonder if a new Priest album is as good as any of the fifteen that came before it," Tipton acknowledged. "I'm confident they'll think this one is. It has some manic, hooligan tracks, like 'Machine Man' and 'Bloodsuckers', as well as a typical 'Ripper' song in 'Jekyll and Hyde'. The songs "Machine Man" and "Feed on Me" were included in Judas Priest's box setMetalogy.
