Killers (1981)
Killers is a 1981 heavy metal album by Iron Maiden.
A band swapping parts at full speed. Iron Maiden's second album reached British shops on 16 February 1981 through EMI, and American ones on 11 May through Harvest and Capitol. Paul Di'Anno sings on it, the voice that carried Maiden's first two records and never turned up on a third.
Two newcomers set the terms. Adrian Smith plays on an Iron Maiden album for the first time here. Martin Birch works the desk, also a first, and he stayed: Killers opens a producer run that carried the band through their next eight records, ending with Fear of the Dark in 1992. Few albums in the catalogue sit on such a clean dividing line.
Di'Anno went soon after, let go once his stage performances slipped under alcohol and cocaine. That makes this the closing chapter of Maiden's first era. Play it for the moment it holds: a young English metal band with a new guitarist, a new producer and a singer already on his way out, all captured on the same set of tapes. Everything the band became after 1981 starts from here.
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A few thoughts on Killers
The documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is the obvious next step, since it covers the band's climb through these same years. For the English metal scene around them, I Am Ozzy gives Ozzy Osbourne's blunt account of touring, drinking and getting fired, and Black Sabbath: Doom Let Loose fills in the Birmingham side of the story.
For fiction running on the same fuel, We sold our souls is a horror novel built out of heavy metal and the people it chews up, and Trick or Treat is the 1980s film version of that idea, vinyl and fandom and all. Heavy Metal, the illustrated magazine, shows where the fantasy artwork on sleeves of this period came from. If the pull is the doomed British frontman rather than the riffs, Control sits in the same late-seventies scene.