Review: ILSY – ILSY

Lion’s Pride Music – July 31^st, 2026

Reviewer – Jason Hopper

The band ILSY was born from the ashes of the band Sheela, a band who re-released their debut album ‘Burned Down‘ two years ago on Lions Pride Music (review here). After finalizing the re-release, lead singer and main songwriter Wolfgang Terne wanted to put together another project that was a bit more of a 70s blues-based sound mixed with a collection of ballads. That’s exactly what you get with this debut.

Opening with the groove heaviness of ‘Never Gonna Come Back’, you immediately recall late 80s, early 90s bands like Lynch Mob and Tangier. While the melody is solid and Wolfgang sounds great, the chorus is a bit of a letdown. He just repeats the title several times. A good song that could have been great had he worked on the chorus a bit more and added more lyrics.

What follows is the best song on the album. ‘Tomorrow’ has a groove that is both familiar and fresh. A mid-tempo blast that could have easily been a Cinderella song back in the day. It’s exactly what I love about heavy blues hard rock. Fun in its approach and optimistic in its delivery. A song designed to make you move and groove.

Another standout is ‘Eyes of a Stranger’, with its mix of emphatic swagger and power ballad majesty. Wolfgang’s smooth delivery is perfect, accenting at all the right times to enhance all the punchy parts. Great stuff.

It took me a bit to warm to ‘When Love Leaves The Town’. It has an expected blues-based groove, which this album relies on a little too much, but does something unexpected by double timing in the middle of the solo, bringing to life a song that was feeling a bit flat.

It’s at the halfway point where the album starts to dip for me. A similar type of mid-tempo-based groove is prominent in the remaining tracks. In isolation, these tracks are solid and all are well constructed. As a collective, these songs become monotonous.

With that said, It is more a personal bias to critique this decision as this is the direction Wolfgang chose in constructing the album. Those who love heavy mid-tempo grooves with grit and slower numbers delivered with passion will get more out of this album. I was personally hoping for something more along the lines of Sheela. These are well constructed songs, but a few more rockers along the lines of ‘Tomorrow’ would have created a more varied album and something I would be returning to more often. Knowing this info, I would advise checking ILSY out on streaming first to decide if this album will appeal to your personal tastes or if cherry picked songs would be the way to go.

Track list:

1. Never Gonna Come Back
2. Tomorrow
3. Signs
4. Eyes Of A Stranger
5. When Love Leaves The Town
6. Save My Soul
7. Love Won’t Come Around
8. Let It Go
9. Wild Waters
10. Fight Fire With Fire
11. Sea Of Love

Web Links:

Facebook