Wings of Steel

A partnership, not a band

Wings of Steel was formed in Los Angeles in 2019 by the vocalist Leo Unnermark and the guitarist Parker Halub. It has stayed, on record at least, exactly that: a two-man operation. Halub writes and plays the guitars and the bass, Unnermark writes the lyrics and sings, and the two of them compose everything together. The band's own account of its finances is blunt — no backing, self-financed by the pair of them, which is unusual for an act now playing 10,000-capacity rooms in Canada.

The first release was a self-titled EP in March 2022. It did enough to get the pair noticed by the traditional-metal underground in Europe, which is where almost all of the band's momentum has come from since; the American breakthrough has arrived last, not first.

Gates of Twilight and the argument about focus

The debut album, Gates of Twilight, was self-released on 19 May 2023. Reviewers heard a lot of different records fighting inside it: traditional metal, epic doom, blues rock and a streak of late-eighties hard rock, with Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and the Dio-fronted Black Sabbath all named as reference points. Angry Metal Guy gave it 3.5 out of 5, praising the playing and Unnermark's range while calling the songwriting scattershot and the hair-metal instincts a drag on it. The verdict came with a condition attached — tighten the genre-jumping, the reviewer wrote, and the band could make something far bigger.

What followed was work, not promotion. A first run of European club dates produced Live in France, released in December 2024 and still the only document of the band on stage in its early form. It is a modest release by design, and it did its job: by 2025 they were being booked across Europe on their own name, playing the Rock 'n' Roll Club in Rho, Italy on 5 July 2025 and On the Rocks in Helsinki ten days later.

Winds of Time

The second album, Winds of Time, arrived on 17 October 2025 — eight tracks and roughly fifty minutes, opening with a title track of 10:40 and closing with the 8:21 of Flight of the Eagle. In between sits Saints and Sinners, a 2:46 sprint that works as the album's shortest and most direct statement. The record was produced by the band; Damien Rainaud mixed and mastered it at Mix Unlimited and also played the drums on it. The sleeve is by Spencer Caligiuri.

The reception was markedly warmer than for the debut. RockmusicRaider scored it 8 out of 10 and called it state-of-the-art heavy metal, reaching for early Bruce Dickinson and Ronnie James Dio to describe Unnermark's singing and singling out Rainaud's drumming; the German site Flyctory made it a top pick at 4.9 out of 5, with the long title track as the highlight for its shifts between thrash-adjacent riffing, a hymn-like chorus and passages that sit closer to a ballad. The charge of unfocused writing that dogged Gates of Twilight has largely gone quiet.

Distribution reflects the band's structure. Orders in the United States go direct through the band; European CD and vinyl are handled by High Roller Records, the German label that has spent two decades servicing exactly this audience.

A European summer before the American autumn

Most of 2026 to date has been spent in Europe. The band played the Into The Grave festival in Leeuwarden on 13 June with a 35-minute early-afternoon slot, headlined Kyttaro in Athens the following night for a full 90 minutes, and appeared on Mainstage 01 at Hellfest in Clisson on 19 June for half an hour at quarter past twelve. They closed the month at the Slaughter Club in Paderno Dugnano, near Milan, on 27 June.

The French site La Pause Metal, reviewing the Friday of Hellfest, described a set with almost no production — a logo on the backdrop and nothing else — and an early sound problem, but rated the band a genuine discovery on the strength of Unnermark's high register. That is the pattern of most European notices: the staging is nothing, the singing carries it.

The Sabaton run, and the seven months it lost

By October 2025 Wings of Steel had been announced as opener on Sabaton's Legends On Tour across North America, with Pop Evil in the middle slot and a start date of 9 February 2026 in Fort Lauderdale. It did not happen on schedule. Sabaton's bassist Pär Sundström developed inflammation in both arms and the whole run was pulled, leaving ticket holders to rebook or refund.

The rescheduled dates were announced on 5 March 2026. The tour now opens at the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax on 23 September 2026 and finishes in Fort Lauderdale on 12 December, taking in around thirty cities. Tampa, Greensboro and Pittsburgh fell away in the reshuffle; Orlando was added, and Winnipeg gained a second night at the Burton Cummings Theatre on demand. The Canadian opening leg runs through Place Bell in Laval on 25 September, HISTORY in Ottawa on the 26th, Toronto on the 27th, Thunder Bay on the 29th, Winnipeg on 1 and 2 October, Edmonton on the 4th, Calgary on the 5th and the PNE Forum in Vancouver on the 8th, before the tour crosses into the United States for November and December.

For a band that has never had a label advance, this is the largest thing they have done by a wide margin: a full autumn in arenas and theatres in front of an audience that, for the most part, has not heard of them.