Surrounded by Poseurs

If metal has been your identity for as long as it has been mine, you’ve probably received a lot of recommendations of bands to check out. Most of them have probably been from well-meaning normies who couldn’t have been further off (“Hey, you listen to metal, right? You ever heard of Five Finger Death Punch/Bad Omens/Sleep Token/etc?”), or if not, a completely obvious recommendation (yes, I do, in fact, like Metallica). But after being a metalhead long enough, you’ve probably been to enough shows, made a few metalhead friends, or at least cultivated a good enough Spotify algorithm to get some knowledgeable band recommendations. And when those recommendations hit the spot, it’s amazing. But sometimes they don’t. And you’ll probably have those bands recommended to you more than once from different sources. And every time you try to give them a go again to figure out what you missed, you’re […]

Replacing a lead singer is hard. They are usually the spokespeople for your band, doing the most interviews, standing front and center in band photos, and bantering with the audience between songs during concerts. If the fans form a parasocial relationship with any of your band’s members, it’s usually going to be the lead singer. But with that responsibility can also come big egos, drug problems, and drama. Although it’s sometimes necessary to let your diva lead singer go (if he didn’t already quit on you), it can be a challenge to maintain your fans’ attention with a whole new face of the band. Even if you successfully pull off a lead singer swap, the best you can hope for is for your fanbase to be divided on which singer was better and debate it on internet forums for years to come. And since I’m getting tired of seeing these […]

It’s hard to think of an original band name these days. All the good ones seem to be taken. I even had this problem when writing The Encyclopedia of Demons trying to think of names for fictional metal bands, usually having to settle for names that were only taken by a handful of lesser-known bands. Even then, that still didn’t entirely help since most of my fictional bands are also underground in the story, so my dad wasn’t sure if I was referring to the real band Lamašhtu when I introduced the made-up band Lamashtu in the story. This is exactly why I set it in an era before stuff like Spotify existed. Nonetheless, some bands are still able to strike it big despite having terrible names that no other band would want. And if you think they at least have a good explanation behind these stupid names, well, you’d […]

As metalheads, we know our choice of aggressive, frightening, and violent music is simply an outlet for our negative emotions so we can be perfectly level-headed, chill guys the rest of the time. Except for when some of our favorite artists absolutely confirm the stereotypes and act like unhinged lunatics. You could disavow the artists entirely and stop supporting them, but let’s face it, you’re not going to do that. Instead, I devised a system that will let you determine if the guilt of listening to some of your favorite artists is worth it. It’s a little intricate, so try to keep up: I give each artist a scumbaggery score (my sources for what they did are “bro trust me,” I ain’t linking all this crap) and a brutality score (brutality in the good way, that is. See, I told you this would be intricate). I then subtract the scumbaggery […]

Metal music is no stranger to scares. For many bands that’s the entire point, with perverse lyrics, gory album art, and frightening stage outfits. It’s a constant battle of one-upmanship. However, as metalheads we can become pretty desensitized to this excessive brutality, so it takes something pretty special to make a legitimately scary metal song: a perfect balance between “shocking” and “haunting.” Most metal bands that might be considered “scary” (at least by normie standards) fall on the “shocking” side, focusing on violence and gore. The most obvious example would be Cannibal Corpse, who are undoubtedly brutal with sickening lyrics and album art, but aren’t exactly ones for subtlety. Practically all brutal death metal, slam, goregrind, etc would also fall into this category. On the other extreme, some bands nail the “haunting” side of scariness with slow, lingering riffs and dark, wailing vocals, but never quite pack that punch to […]

Sometimes a band will release an album so killer they’ll be the victims of their own success and inadvertently overshadow the rest of their discography. And I’m not just talking about legacy acts who have been releasing quality records for decades, but their fans only ever want to hear their “old stuff.” Nor am I talking about bands who secured their fame with one good debut album then skated on their reputation with a bunch of mediocre to bad releases afterward (sorry, Entombed). Hell, most of the albums I’ll be naming won’t even be early in their respective bands’ discographies. The criteria for being on this list is: a) Being an excellent album from an overall excellent discography, b) Somehow overshadows the rest of its respective discography and be my constant go-to whenever I want to listen to that band, c) And although this post was inspired by this Hard […]

Metalheads love to talk about bands they think are “underrated.” Although they might have a tenuous understanding of what that word even means (the definition is “not rated or valued highly enough”), I have discovered some pretty killer new music from YouTube videos and blog posts about underrated metal bands. However, I’m finding the entire argument over underrated and overrated metal bands itself to be an overrated conversation. While metalheads have no trouble acknowledging the Tampa death metal scene, Bay Area thrash, Norwegian black metal, etc, there are plenty other geographical areas that are home to multiple well-respected acts who go unacknowledged. Sometimes this can be attributed to the price of success: a few of the below metal scenes are already so well-known for another style of music that they get overshadowed in comparison. In other cases these scenes may have been a little late to the party, with their style […]