Big, important shows are a Hell of a time. Seeing Tom. G. Warrior perform Hellhammer songs with Triumph of Death at Maryland Deathfest last year? Yeah, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. Getting to finally hit a Metallica concert, and it happens to be a headlining slot at Lollapalooza? Buddy, you better believe that’s quite the occasion….
Are you ready to have your skull caved in? Kind of a weird question to ask, I know, but if you’re a death metal fan then you’re probably always down for a little cranial crushing if the mood is right. Well, it’s a Friday and the mood is more than right if you’ve picked up…
Faith, at least how it’s practiced by a large swath of the world, is a cancer on our society. Think about some of the worst abuses of power in recent years, from pedophile priests to apartheid states to the vicious and obsessive persecution of trans individuals across the U.S., faith in a higher power has…
The old saying goes that if you stare into the abyss too long, it’ll stare back. While that might sound like a frightening prospect to most people, extreme metallers are cut from a different cloth. If you’re a fan of heavy records that effectively mix doom, death, and black metal, the abyss returning your gaze isn’t…
Extreme metal is meant for the nighttime. Ok, so there’s obviously nothing wrong with blaring Celtic Frost at any time of day but the night just feels more appropriate for anything and everything extreme. Face it, your black Cause of Death T-shirt looks way cooler when it’s not 80 degrees and sunny out. Sure, outdoor festivals are…
Sometimes a record comes along that is both firmly rooted in a genre and that transcends that genre. It’s a tough task to make something that is readily identifiable as death metal, for instance, but that also includes elements and ideas that are pretty far afield from what you’d normally get with a typical release…
Death metal needs bands like Nothingness. There’s nothing wrong with sticking firmly within a specific genre and making art that doesn’t stray from the boundaries of what makes that genre unique. Bands do it all the time and plenty of my favorite bands aren’t the most experimental in their approaches. There’s nothing wrong with that…
Going it alone can be tough, especially when you’re a band. Writing, recording, and performing music is an onerous enough task when you have partners around you, let alone when all the decisions fall on your shoulders. There certainly are benefits, like not fighting over creative directions and figuring out how to split revenue, but there’s…
It’s always a Hell of an exciting time when a band you really dig releases new music. As soon as that album gets announced, you circle that date on your calendar and now you’ve got something to look forward to, something to get you through the day and give you some kind of light at…
Talk to anyone deeply into extreme metal for long enough and you’ll walk away with a list of new bands to check out and a full playlist of stuff you’ve missed or haven’t gotten around to yet. Extreme metal fandom, and music fandom in general, is a mapping diagram of bands leading you to other…