Kai Hansen: Born With A Hammer

A new album from one of Helloween's founders. Kai Hansen's Born With A Hammer came out on 18 September 2026 on earMUSIC. The label is selling it as his first solo work since XXX – Three Decades In Metal, which went out under the name Hansen & Friends.

Hansen handles the vocals. On guitar are Eike Freese, Alexander Dietz (Heaven Shall Burn) and Tim Hansen (Induction), and Dan Wilding of Carcass is behind the drums. Freese produced it, with Hansen and Dietz alongside him. The first of the ten songs, "Feeding The Beast", is also the first single and got a video. The second single, "Welcome To Life", arrived in August.

The album comes as a CD digipak, a 180-gram black gatefold LP and a limited picture-disc LP. The only price on show at Rough Trade is 42.99 euros (probably for one of the vinyl editions). When I looked, all three editions were sold out.

The critics liked it: MyGlobalMind gave it 9 out of 10, and The Dark Melody, which publishes in Spanish, gave it 8.8. They agree that the record sounds like neither Helloween nor Gamma Ray. The title track tips its hat to Queen, and "I.D.G.A.F." puts a Kinks-style riff over electronic drums. Some writers found all this variety scattered, though, and say not every song hits equally hard. Anyone expecting power metal may get a bit of a surprise. But after a career of more than forty years, changing direction is, to my mind, a perfectly sound decision.