Accept - "Humanoid"
Just accept that you'll be headbanging for a while
Every once in a while, there exists a legend who manages to escape the spotlight. Sometimes, necessary groundwork must be laid for those who follow to achieve the fame that they would not, otherwise, earn. As Neil Armstrong said to Neil Gaiman, “I just went where I was sent” — a feat which would have been impossible without the hard work of thousands of unsung others who did the math and built the pieces and assembled the rockets.
But if you ask anybody to name any individual responsible for our successful landing on the moon, most will instantly turn to Armstrong.1 He’s the rock star who first stepped on the moon; he’s the one in the history books.
Similarly, if you ask folks in the metal scene to name an influential metal band, you’ll get a lot of Metallica or Black Sabbath or Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. Some might focus on more genre-specific founders, such as King Crimson or regional influences like Sodom.
You might even hear a muffled “Megadeth!” come from the vicinity of Mustaine’s ass.2
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen Accept come up in metal circles on Reddit, Facebook, or elsewhere. Granted, I haven’t been on Reddit in a while. They’re incredibly overlooked by the general metalhead public, but here’s a list of bands, compiled on Accept’s wikipedia page (if you want to check sources), who have listed Accept as an influence:
For those keeping score at home, that’s all four of the Big Four of Thrash, one of the Teutonic Trio, three of the Big Four of European Power, and a host of other critical, commercial, and influential successes like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pantera, and more.
And you might wonder why you’ve never heard of them, but the Metal scene(s) evolved quickly in a short period of time. Add to that the incredibly slow, shaky start for Accept, and you wind up with a sleeper band who managed to innovate at the right time to be incredibly influential, but too soon to find the fame and glory.
Accept first kicked off as a concept in 1968 as Band X, and was riddled by instability issues, as their lineup remained in constant flux. The lineup began to stabilize in the mid-70s, and the band was renamed to “Accept” in 1976, with their debut album arriving in 1979. Their first five albums released annually from ‘79 to ‘83, with the 1983 release, Balls to the Wall, being their first real success.
In the decades since, Accept had seen even more lineup changes, with lead guitarist Wolf Hoffmann remaining the only constant, and multiple hiatuses.
Humanoid is the band’s 17th studio album, arriving 45 years after their debut. They released their 16th album, Too Mean to Die, in 2021. I rated that one Green.
And Humanoid starts strong with “Diving Into Sin” and “Humanoid”, and manages to keep the energy consistently high throughout the album. What’s more: most tracks have incredibly catchy melodies and kickass vibes to back them up.
And this is all with a vocalist (Mark Tornillo) and lead guitarist (Wolf Hoffmann) who are both in their sixties. And the rest of the band isn’t much younger. The band is truly a time capsule of Heavy Metal in its youth, with all of the attitude and energy that the genre became known for at its outset. Humanoid very much carries a lot of the same energy that Judas Priest’s Invincible Shield pulled off earlier this year.
Truly, the vibe is so flawless that I can’t even get upset at the usage of the now-gauche phrase “Man Up” as the titular sentiment for a song (track 4).
At-large, the album is loosely bound with existentialism. There is no direct throughline from one song to the next, but they each deal with some aspect of what it’s like to be human — and mortal. “Nobody Gets Out Alive” and “Ravages of Time” are clear just from the titles, dealing with the inevitability of death and the effect of time on a person pretty directly. Other songs are more collective, with “Humanoid” looking at the burgeoning emergence of AI as a real-world factor, and not just a sci-fi concept; “The Reckoning” deals with religious concerns over the end of time and the concept of Rapture, while closer “Southside of Hell” focuses on a single soul’s efforts to reach the doors of Heaven in spite of its Hellish beginnings; “Unbreakable” and the aforementioned “Man Up” focus on the indomitable human spirit in the face of insurmountable odds.
Humanoid is one of those albums where the songs don’t really seem to be closely bound together, but when you step back and look at the bigger picture, it really comes together. Each song is a different color in the palette, and Accept puts them all together to make a vivid portrait of how they see humanity as a whole — its strengths, weaknesses, and challenges.
And all in this incredibly classic Metal package.
Humanoid is one I’ll be listening to quite a bit this year, I think.
Rating: Blue
Some who care about the history of our endeavors to reach space might cite Gene Kranz; others might cite Katherine Johnson or Dorothy Vaughan or just ‘the black women who worked at NASA as calculators’ after seeing the film Hidden Figures.
Dave Mustaine is talented, but he has a rabid legion of mouth-breathing fans who seem to think he’s some flawless divine. This isn’t to challenge Megadeth’s Big Four status, as their influence is undeniable, but I don’t pass up chances to mock ‘Metallica-Was-Better-With-Me-In’ Mustaine, who was kicked out before the band ever released an album.