Ten years after releasing their last full-length album and officially have leaving the active creative work, surprisingly Mekong Delta are back to write a new page of their history. The band is now with different members than during its classic years, namely ideologist and bassist Ralph Hubert, drummer Uli Kusch (ex-Helloween, Masterplan), vocalist Leo Szpigiel (singer in Angel Dusk, Scanner, Crows, a.o.), and guitarist Peter Sjoberg (Theory in Practice). Literally for a few months, in the middle of this year, the details about the return got clear. A contract was signed with AFM Records, the content of the disc was revealed, and with contradictory success there were various proposals for the cover of the album, entitled “Lurking Fear”. These were the new things about that band. However, the content of the CD gets us back straight to the time when the possibilities of reaching a decent sound quality were not many, and the notions about it were different. The term “progressive thrash” had also a different formula. Every song in “Lurking Fear” confirms that the band wants to keep all these old maxims and that in their present music they do not want to have any changes. This might be ok for old-school fans, but it will not attract anybody else’s attention. This is an album in which the first song shows what can be expected until the end of the record. The unvaried riffs, the attempts to grab the attention with great technique, and the desperate tries of Szpigiel to sing are definitely not the thing that most people wanted from this group. I cannot find a single thing in this album that doesn’t irritate. Maybe the situation could be different with other musicians or vocalist, but the things are what they are. I can only be sorry for the bad performance of a band that showed it can make great musical models over the years.