Alien Weaponry – Te Rā | Album Review

Māori thrashers Alien Weaponry are back with their third album Te Rā, taking you down a rabbit hole of Māori history and culture.

Alien Weaponry exploded onto the scene with their first album Tu back in in 2018 and followed it up with Tangaroa in 2021. Seven years after that debut release, have the boys lost any of their fire? Not a bit of it. Te Rā finds the band as angry and as fired up as they ever have been. Similarly to Bloodywood, their music is a blend of the old and new, the traditional and the modern, the Māori language blending with pounding drums and heavily distorted riffs. This isn’t just music, it’s a history lesson.

This new album sees the band diving deep into their heritage to tackle subjects such as the theft and trade of the preserved heads of Māori people in ‘Mao Moko’. Called Toi moko, or mokomokai, these are the preserved heads of Māori, where the faces have been decorated by traditional tā moko tattooing. Even now, 200-some years later, efforts are still ongoing to have these heads reclaimed from museums and private collections and returned home.

We continue delving into Māori folklore with tracks like ‘Taniwha’, (featuring Randy Blythe from Lamb Of God) which not only references the mythical Māori monster that dwells in the waterways, It’s an indictment of the land purchases that were a big part of events leading up to the New Zealand wars that spanned from 1845 to 1872.

Where the album falters is when the band shifts away from the traditional. Tracks like ‘Crown’, ‘Hanging by a Thread’ and ‘Blackened Sky’ which, while they still have a message, feel like rather more generic, middle of the road thrash metal offerings compared to the rest of the album. Looking at modern day ills such as feelings of disenfranchisement, suicide/depression and the looming threat of war (with specific mention of ongoing war in Ukraine). These are still important topics to draw attention to, but there’s hundreds of other songs covering these topics and Alien Weaponry just don’t quite do enough to make their versions stand out.

One exception from this is the distressingly catchy ‘1000 Friends’ which sees the band focusing their attention on the toxicity and fakeness of social media in the track with lyrics like “Dissolution of real life / Only satisfied by seeing likes” and the rather on the nose “1000 friends, and yet you’re all alone”. There’s no escaping that humanity in the 21st century is more connected as a society than we have ever been, but it’s also easier for individuals to become more isolated, and feel more worthless, than ever.

Te Rā is an album with one foot in the present and one in the past, an album that speaks to traditional values while acknowledging the stresses and tribulations of the modern world. It’s an angry album, an album about loss, about feeling helpless, about systems that don’t respect the individual. It’s the voice of an abused and exploited people, roaring into the void that they are still here, and that they will not go gentle into that good night.