Riot’s The Privilege of Power is a heavy metal album with a lot of different personalities. At its core, the band plays a fast, aggressive style of power metal, with soaring vocals, pounding drums and plenty of guitar fireworks. But there’s more going on here than just speed and volume.

Riot brings together two of heavy metal’s most appealing qualities: its theatricality and its musical nerdiness. These are musicians who enjoy playing with arrangements, changing tempos and pushing their instruments, but they’re also interested in creating dramatic scenes and telling stories.

One of the album’s most distinctive features is its use of news broadcasts, spoken-word clips and electronic effects. Songs often begin with snippets of dialogue that establish a sense of conflict, paranoia or impending danger. Riot takes those recordings further by cutting them up, repeating phrases and manipulating them almost like a DJ working with samples. There’s an industrial electronic quality to some of these passages, creating an unusual combination of sounds that sits alongside the traditional metal instrumentation. The addition of a horn section makes things even more interesting, giving several songs an unexpected funk and soul influence.

“On Your Knees” combines the band’s high-speed metal with samples and political imagery that suggest a world controlled by oppressive forces. “Metal Soldiers” continues that atmosphere, but its lyrics also suggest a group of traveling warriors using their music as an instrument of rebellion.

Riot also knows how to have fun with its musical detours. “Killer” brings the horns to the foreground, adding a funky groove and a much looser vocal performance that sounds almost like a blend of hard rock, blues and rap.

“Runaway” provides the album’s power ballad, while “Maryanne” moves into much more conventional, radio-friendly melodic rock. Elsewhere, “Dance of Death” becomes a seven-minute supernatural adventure, with an unusual Asian-sounding introduction before launching into a furious metal performance. “Storming the Gates of Hell” takes biblical imagery and turns it into a full-blown battle anthem, complete with horns that sound like a military call to charge.

The album closes with “Racing with the Devil on a Spanish Highway,” an instrumental originally written by jazz-fusion guitarist Al Di Meola. At more than seven minutes, it’s perhaps the clearest showcase of the band’s musical ambitions. The song moves between high-octane metal passages and quieter, more introspective guitar sections, with plenty of timing changes and shifts in intensity. It’s a fascinating way to end the record, allowing Riot to show off a different side of their musicianship without relying on vocals or another dramatic story.

The Privilege of Power is an entertaining heavy metal album because it isn’t content to be just one thing. Riot can play fast and hard, slow things down for a melodic rock song, build a theatrical fantasy or experiment with electronic sounds and unexpected musical influences.

There’s a lot of exceptional musicality on display here, and listeners who enjoy hearing musicians play with rhythms, arrangements and styles will find plenty to appreciate. It’s a record that demonstrates just how many different directions heavy metal can take.

Verdict: Worth a Spin

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