Yngwie Malmsteen will release Hell Or High Water on November 13 through Music Theories Recordings and Artone Label Group, his 23rd solo album and the first since 2021’s Parabellum.
Lead single “Now Or Never” is out now with an accompanying video.
The guitarist wrote the record in isolation, a working method he adopted during the pandemic and has kept since.
“When I started making records, I would just take the songs I had lying around,” Malmsteen admits. “Later on, I fell into a schedule — make a record, tour the record and then write the next record. Over the pandemic, I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months. I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”
Nine made the album.
Recording took roughly as long as the writing. Speaking with Eddie Trunk at the Monsters Of Rock festival in São Paulo this April, Malmsteen said he had been in the studio for close to five months without a break, and described the material simply as “very Malmsteen-esque.”
Asked at the time whether it amounted to a concept album, he was noncommittal: “No, I wouldn’t call it that. I mean, if you wanted to, you could analyze it any way you like. You can go, ‘Yeah, it’s a concept album,’ but it’s not meant to be. But it could be, I guess.”
Malmsteen described how the material arrives.
“Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” he said. “It’s like that movie ‘Amadeus‘. Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form. I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like. If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you. You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want. The language of music is simple. There are certain notes that belong together in whatever stylistic direction and sound pleasant to the ear. The ideas don’t come all the time, but when they do, it’s like an avalanche. The pieces I choose for my records are like gifts that I capture because they amaze me. I’m very lucky in that sense.”
Hell Or High Water ends with “Father“, written for Malmsteen‘s father, who died last year. The album as a whole is dedicated to him.
“He was an amazing man,” Malmsteen recalled. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it. Niccolò Paganini once said, ‘One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly’. It’s one thing to be a typewriter and another thing to be someone who writes stories that can touch people. That was always the point.”
The album mixes vocal tracks with instrumentals. Malmsteen handles most of the lead vocals himself, as he has in recent years after working with a long line of singers across four decades.
Two of the instrumentals take their titles from scientific subjects, “Antikythera“, after the ancient Greek geared mechanism recovered from a shipwreck, and “Beyond Zeta Reticuli“, referencing the binary star system. According to the label, “(On The) Battlefield” and “Eye For An Eye” carry some of his strongest vocal work to date.
Hell Or High Water Tracklist:
- “Now Or Never”
- “Am Caprice/Hell Or High Water”
- “(He Is) Living A Lie”
- “Antikythera”
- “(On The) Battlefield”
- “Beyond Zeta Reticuli”
- “Prestissimo In Bm/Adagio”
- “Eye For An Eye”
- “Father”
The Band And What’s Next
Malmsteen‘s current lineup features Nick Marino on keyboards, Emilio Martinez on bass and Kevin Klingenschmid on drums.
He heads to Asia before the album lands, with a run through China and Japan opening in Beijing on September 4.
His last release was the live album Tokyo Live, issued in April 2025 through Music Theories Recordings and recorded at Zepp DiverCity in Tokyo on May 11, 2024 during his 40th-anniversary world tour.
