DragonForce

It's no small understatement that England's DragonForce is being called the torchbearer of the power-metal movement; picture Iron Maiden and then add broadswords and cheese. But if anything, the band's lightning-fast, shred-heavy, keyboard-augmented filigree simultaneously eclipses and negates absolutely everything that's ever fallen under the power-metal umbrella. Quite simply, no other band can keep up. In fact, if it were possible for a band to be super-mega-hyper-power-metal-squared, that would almost describe the level of intensity sustained throughout DragonForce's third album and U.S. debut, Inhuman Rampage. But to witness the band live is to understand how much DragonForce have upped the ante for its parent genre: If these guys didn't exist, someone would've had to invent them just to keep things moving forward.