Bandcamp / Buy The heavy metal band Eternal Champion are led by singer Jason Tarpey, whose vocals share a bellowing timbre with Ozzy Osbourne in the â80s, and whose ideas cannot be contained by his music, so he has to flesh them out with fantasy novels with titles like The Godblade. His are stories of fallen kings and cosmic deities, full of intricate world-building and violent action sequences. When you see the band live, he can often be found center stage, raising a huge, glimmering sword toward the heavens. Ravening Iron is the Texas bandâs second album, following 2016âs The Armor of Ire, but they already feel like lifers. Tarpey is also the vocalist of Iron Age, while guitarist Blake Ibanez plays in Power Trip and the other three membersâbassist Brad Raub, guitarist John Powers, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Arthur Rizkâare members of the similarly epically scaled Sumerlands. Together, they treat Eternal Champion as a kind of fantasy camp: Their job is not simply to replicate the atmosphere of their favorite â80s metal but to transport themselves to those landscapes to carve new ground.