Duff Dives: A Rock & Metal Deep Dive Podcast · Duff Dives | Rock and Metal Album Reviews

A Tough Act to Follow: Judas Priest's "Jugulator" (with Eli of Dark Hymns From the Cold North)

·1 hr 24 min·5 clips

Tim Owens reportedly nailed “Victim of Changes” in auditions, including “whiskey woman, don’t you know that you are driving me insane.”

Duff opens casually. Eli gets room to talk up his YouTube channel, and the banter stays loose enough that even subscriber counts feel like part of the warm-up. Then the record talk starts wandering in the right way. The excerpt works best when memory takes over and the two of them try to rebuild the metal moment around Painkiller. A few records become little anchors: Death Angel's Act III, Celtic Frost's Vanity Nemesis, and Dio's Lock Up the Wolves all land on the same 1990-ish shelf. Duff keeps catching himself. He starts with the wrong Celtic Frost title, rechecks the Cold Lake timeline, then lands on Vanity Nemesis because the date finally clicks. That is the mode here. This is less a clean Judas Priest lecture than two fans sorting out an era through records, videos, hats, shows, and half-remembered interviews. Rob Halford becomes the center of the thread. Duff remembers him on stage in an interview, Scott Travis beside him after Racer X, and a fluorescent trucker hat that somehow turns into a Pantera connection. Eli helps place it. They talk through Halford's affection for Pantera at that point, with the reference leaning toward Cowboys from Hell instead of the later Vulgar Display of Power period. The larger point is plain enough. Judas Priest, in Duff's telling, were not sealed-off elders guarding the throne. They noticed younger bands. Duff likes that because Priest could be fired up by the same bands they helped spark, which is a solid fan case for why the Painkiller era still has charge. The excerpt has some ad noise, plus the usual Duff sign-off toward YouTube and Instagram. Between those bookends, though, the draw is the cluttered, exact, half-corrected metal memory work. It sounds like people flipping through records while arguing the timeline, which may be the best way into this kind of late-Priest talk anyway.

As heard by us

A memory-heavy Priest chat that connects Jugulator to a wider metal moment.

Duff Dives keeps the focus on Judas Priest's Jugulator, but it never stays in one place for long. Duff and Eli keep circling back through Painkiller, Scott Travis, Pantera, Death Angel's Act III, Celtic Frost, and Dio's Lock Up the Wolves, which gives the episode a broader metal…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want Priest talk that tracks the whole metal neighborhood around Jugulator and Painkiller.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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