Some musicians, after four decades onstage, seem most comfortable guarding their own monument, regularly polishing the same old tricks and making sure nothing accidentally sounds too different. Kai Hansen clearly does not belong to that group. „Born With a Hammer”, his first solo material since 2016’s „XXX – Three Decades in Metal”, could easily have turned into a collection of safe variations on Helloween and Gamma Ray. Instead, Hansen does something far more interesting: he takes everything he is known for and then, with obvious pleasure, starts pulling it apart. Power metal collides with punk, hard rock, electronic music, and reggae, while that unmistakable Hansen grin seems to hover over the whole thing, suggesting that he knows exactly when he is going too far. Ten songs and just under forty-six minutes make for a strange, at times almost brazen record, but it is very difficult to mistake it for the work of a musician recording simply because he feels he is supposed to.

Hansen’s last decade has been anything but inactive. The Pumpkins United era, which began in 2017, brought both him and Michael Kiske back into Helloween, and the reunion gradually became far more than a nostalgic tour. First came 2021’s „Helloween”, followed by „Giants & Monsters” in 2025, and then an extensive tour celebrating the band’s fortieth anniversary, which continued into 2026. In practical terms, Hansen once again finds himself operating inside a massive touring machine. Gamma Ray has paid the biggest price for that – 2014’s „Empire of the Undead” remains the band’s most recent studio album – but returning to Helloween seems to have triggered another surge of creative energy. Crucially, „Born With a Hammer” never sounds like a collection of leftovers from his main band’s sessions. If anything, it feels like a side exit from a very large building: familiar melodies can still be heard behind the door, but once outside, Hansen is free to head in any direction he chooses.

 

Interestingly, Hansen himself has admitted that he never intended to make a second solo album at all. The material began taking shape during the pandemic, when boredom led him to write songs without worrying about which project they might eventually belong to. Over time, it became clear that some of those ideas suited Helloween – „We Can Be Gods” from „Giants & Monsters” dates from that period, while Hansen has said that two more songs are expected to appear on the band’s next album – while the rest gradually formed a separate body of work. Eike Freese, Alexander Dietz, and Dan Wilding returned to the studio, while Kai’s son Tim Hansen completed the lineup. This time, however, the parade of guest vocalists is gone. Hansen keeps the microphone for himself, giving the album a more personal character. Another family touch comes in the form of „Triple Trouble”, composed by Tim. „Born With a Hammer” therefore becomes a record that captures the free flow of ideas between Hansen’s three musical worlds: Helloween, Gamma Ray, and the project bearing his own name.

 

 

What matters most, however, is that you can genuinely hear that freedom. „Feeding the Beast” opens calmly, almost melancholically, before moving into familiar, heavily guitar-driven territory. Just as the listener begins to think they know where the album is heading, „Welcome to Life” blows the formula apart with punk energy and an unexpected reggae middle section. The even more mischievous „Don’t Care” brings electronics and an almost Eurodance pulse into the metal framework, while „Wait and See” darkens the picture with downtuned guitars, jagged rhythms, and an industrial chill. On paper, it looks a little like the playlist of someone who cannot decide what they actually want to listen to, but Hansen usually manages to hold all these ideas together through his unmistakable melodic instinct and his own slightly raspy voice. That is exactly why „Born With a Hammer” works best not as the next album by one of the fathers of European power metal, but as a catalog of his musical reflexes. It can be messy and absurd, but instead of cold calculation, what comes through almost constantly is the genuine joy of playing.

The most convincing moments are the ones where that freedom meets Hansen’s classic sense of drama. The eight-minute „Born With a Hammer” grows out of a piano introduction, moves through a series of contrasting sections, and openly bows to Queen through theatrical choirs, shifts in dynamics, and guitar grandeur reminiscent of Brian May. This is hardly a new fascination. A similar element could already be heard in Gamma Ray’s monumental „Heading for Tomorrow”, although here Hansen pushes it almost to the edge of pastiche. „End of the Road” also works extremely well, balancing its heaviness with keyboards, while „Triple Trouble” brings a punk kick and the noticeably younger energy of Tim. „Invaders” returns almost ostentatiously to the metal of the 1980s and could easily fit somewhere between early Helloween and Gamma Ray, while the closing „Wonderland” wraps things up with a huge riff and a more traditional sense of heavy-metal discipline. Beneath all the stylistic costume changes, then, there is still a musician who has spent decades knowing exactly how to write a riff and a chorus that stick in your head.

 

 

The biggest doubts arise precisely when Hansen exercises that freedom with almost no restraint. „Born With a Hammer” does not always flow like a unified album; at times it feels more like a sequence of ten very different ideas held together primarily by the personality of the man behind them. The jump from reggae to electronics to industrial textures can be entertaining, but it can also disrupt the record’s momentum, while some of the more modern touches in „Wait and See” sound less like an attempt to chase current trends than a deliberate glance back at an aesthetic from a decade or two ago. The most debatable moment remains „I.D.G.A.F.”: its rock ’n’ roll drive and Motörhead-like grime work well enough, although the lyrical bluntness begins to lose some of its impact after a while. Especially since „Don’t Care” is already sitting nearby, meaning both songs draw to some extent on a similar shrugging, „I couldn’t care less” attitude. The title track’s eight-minute running time may divide listeners as well. Personally, I enjoy its Queen-like excess, even if the inspiration becomes extremely obvious at times. None of this seriously damages the album, though. It is simply the natural price of a record whose greatest strength is its refusal to wear a stylistic leash.

 

And that is probably why „Born With a Hammer” suits Hansen so well at this stage of his career. It is not a new „Keeper of the Seven Keys”, nor is it a substitute Gamma Ray album – and that is a good thing, because trying to recreate either of those worlds would probably have produced something far less interesting. Instead, we get a musician who, after forty years, can still sound unmistakably like himself even while flirting with reggae, punk, industrial music, or Eurodance. Not every experiment lands perfectly, the track order occasionally feels like driving without a map, and a few ideas could have benefited from a harsher editing process. At the same time, it is difficult to deny this album its energy, melody, and – above all – personality. Hansen is not trying to rewrite his own legend from scratch. He is simply exercising the right of someone who helped create the language of European power metal to have a little fun with it now. And even if the hammer does not always hit the nail dead center, the impact is usually satisfying enough to make you look forward to the next swing.

 

Szymon Pęczalski