Metal music has been undergoing a remarkable sonic development. Pioneering releases of the early 1970s by Black Sabbath already contained all essential ingredients of metal’s sonic signature. The growing need for heavier sounds was afforded by a rapidly advancing recording technology, alongside the exploration of production techniques and aesthetics. This chapter traces significant developments in metal music production from the 1970s to the 1990s by looking at key artists, albums and audio professionals to outline how heaviness in recorded form developed in the genre. Many of the analysed engineering practices were adopted, improved and have become standard in contemporary metal production. In this process, production was brought to the fore, making it an increasingly fundamental element of the music, even an art form in itself. This development led to what has become metal’s standard hyper-real aesthetic, which will most likely be pushed further in the ongoing and genre-defining quest for greater heaviness.

Mesopotamian metal’, which includes bands like Absu, Agga, Arallu, Bohema, Decimation, Melechesh, Svartsyn or Tiamat, is a sub-discourse and substyle of metal music that deals with the history of ancient Mesopotamia mainly thematically. Crucial here is the reference to ancient times in this region of the Middle East. The first section of this chapter gives an introduction to the concept of Mesopotamian metal. The most relevant bands are introduced, with Melechesh serving as the paradigmatic example. The next part focuses on the role of history, analysing how the construction of history is undertaken in Mesopotamian metal. It is shown that this discourse promotes a certain brand of historical politics to help solve problems in the present, most of all in the conflict-ridden region of the Middle East. The third part deals with the regional and global contextual linkages of Mesopotamian metal. Summarising this argumentation, the conclusion argues that possibly we can from the past through metal music.

This chapter examines one of the endeavours Latin American music has predominantly engaged in, namely decoloniality, and uses this as a bedrock to examine what we consider to be a pertinent question: What has Latin American metal ever done for the international metal scene? We believe that the answer to this question lies at the juncture of and brings forth a call for ethics in metal music. We propose that decolonial metal music in Latin America incarnates three principles linked to what we term an ethics of affront: (1) acknowledging the humanity of those oppressed by coloniality, (2) acknowledging the reality of the sociopolitical context and (3) fostering activist action as a task for metal music.

This chapter presents an overview of timbre in metal production from a psychoacoustic and computational musicology perspective, particularly focusing on the use of acoustic feature extraction. Both performance and recording technology have undoubtedly influenced tone in metal productions, but how can the underlying acoustic feature sets shaped by this technology inform production and analysis? This chapter includes an applied feature set extraction of stems from My Dying Bride, and concludes with a speculative view of how such features could be used in the training of machine learning classifiers.

This chapter explores the direct experiences of renowned record producers, working with metal music, to construct an in-depth understanding of the genesis, and development, of recorded metal music. Technological democracy has changed the experience of making metal records, affording creative flexibility and control that would historically have been out of reach, technologically and financially. Multitrack technologies and fragmented production processes are also examined. Framed by the experiences of producers that have shaped the recording careers of artists such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, this chapter links the direct experiences of record-making to musical, sociocultural and technological development.

Australian metal music is notably diverse. Although the country’s metal output is proportionate to its population size, many trend-challenging and genre-defining bands have emerged from this community. These bands – indeed all Australian metal bands – have forged their careers in constant negotiation with their distance from international scenic hubs and from one another. This negotiation, in its varied forms, has imprinted on the musical and paramusical texts of many Australian metal artists, many of whom have responded with defiant and convention-challenging practice. This chapter, within a cursory overview of Australian metal music history, explores the work of three such bands: Buffalo, a proto-heavy metal band from the late 1960s; Sadistik Exekution, a death metal band formed in the mid−1980s; and Ne Obliviscaris, a progressive extreme metal band that has been mainstay of Australian metal since the early 2000s. These three bands are demonstrative of the variability and inventiveness of Australian metal. They also exemplify the way answers to these common distance-related pressures, negotiated through obstinate artistic vision and culturally shaped ideals, can result in inimitable music and art.

Since its first moments of relatively wide visibility in the 1990s, black metal music has been one of the most controversial and artistically fecund subgenres of metal. In particular, a rash of serious crimes perpetrated by Norwegian black metallers boosted its visibility, and the salacious details of this period were well-covered by journalists, cultural critics and academics. Following this period, however, black metal musicians around the world took a wide range of approaches to the genre. However, one persistent aspect of black metal’s musical practice is the foregrounding of geographic location and local cultures within both the music and visual artwork. This chapter explores on black metal in the United States’s Mountain West, where the musical and ideological tropes of Norwegian black metal are recontextualised into forms that honour this new location while still retaining key points of Norwegian black metal’s worldview. The focus is particularly on the Colorado band Wayfarer’s interrogations of settler colonialism and the cowboy mythos of Hollywood westerns, but the chapter also touches on broader currents of environmentalism and indigenous activism in North American black metal.

This chapter focuses on ancient Sparta as a representative case for the general reception of classical antiquity in heavy metal music. The Spartans are the basis of songs and albums by dozens of bands across the globe: their last stand at Thermopylae is the most popular ancient battle in metal music, and their king Leonidas is one of the most popular ancient figures. Their appropriation by metal bands is a product of their rise in popularity in popular culture since the premiere of the 2006 film 300, and as in pop-culture, their appeal resonates with political and nationalistic agendas, especially of Greek bands. Sparta’s wide appeal harmonises with metal’s core ethos of hypermasculinity, the liberation of animal instincts and the disruption of systems of conformity and control. As with other topics from the classical world, heavy metal music takes the Spartans from both ancient sources and modern media and remakes them in the image of its own counterculture, that of the few standing defiant against the many.

Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.

Contrary to decades of speculation about the poor mental health of heavy metal fans, newer research (and research conducted with heavy metal fans) has begun to reveal some of the more positive and nuanced outcomes of heavy metal music and culture for well-being (for examples see Dingle and Sharman 2015; Rowe and Guerin 2018). Moving beyond a focus on the music itself, this chapter builds on notions of metal as a protective factor for mental health by exploring three domains of psychosocial well-being through a lens of heavy metal identity formations. Those being stress and coping, belonging and purpose, and certainty of self in an unpredictable world. Concluding comments propose that the internal identity dialogue of metal fans and its interplay with the embodiment of metal identities have significant value for steeling oneself against some of the most pervasive social and emotional threats of modern life.

‘How does one establish and maintain a metal band?’, ‘how does a metal band produce music?’ or ‘how does it feel to be on the stage, with hundreds of people you need to win over?’ are questions a musicologist cannot answer beyond generalisations based on secondary and/or tertiary accounts since they are usually without the means to maintain the proximity to observe, let alone experiencing first-hand. For most academics, making music is a recreational process that they need as a contrast to their research life. Thus, few have investigated the ‘private life’ of a small musical unit we call the band in general, or the metal band in particular. This chapter focuses on the joy and despair of metal musicianship, picking up new skills, and experiencing all kinds of professional and personal conflicts embedded within the metal scene of Istanbul, Turkey. The experience captured in the historiography of the metal band is handled to define the thematic context by articulating phases of metal music-making: formation, songwriting, recording, gigging, publishing and reception. The author intends to assume the stance of a film director rather than a camera to provide thick description and analysis using the habitual tools of social sciences.

Viking metal is one of the few varieties of metal music defined by the songs’ contents and visual elements rather than its sonic aspects. While a band’s music can be affiliated with folk metal, death metal or black metal, the lyrics and visual elements are clearly centred around the Viking Age, Old Norse mythology and the portrayal of Nordic nature. Time is an important feature in Viking metal lyrics and imagery and appears in the shape of a ‘past’ that can be identified as the Viking Age or as a past that lacks a time stamp. Often without a specific description of the underlying idea, the past is frequently attributed with wisdom and continuity. It appears in song lyrics and is depicted in various scenes from a seeming past or with direct reference to the Viking Age in the cover artwork of Viking metal bands. Why is the past such an important feature of Viking metal? What other aspects are deemed important? What ideological aspects do the references to the past entail? To answer these questions, I will identify defining features of Viking metal to then analyse the connotations of ‘the past’ in Viking metal.

Clothing and style are important aspects of heavy metal culture, used by musicians and fans to identify with the broader values and norms of the subculture, and to communicate difference from mainstream culture. Denim and leather garments are fundamental to metal wardrobes, with band t-shirts worn nearly universally to signify particular metal preferences. For serious metal fans, battle jackets offer a unique way to demonstrate musical taste and dedication to metal. A battle jacket is a customised denim jacket (usually with the sleeves removed) embellished with band patches, badges, studs, hand-painting and other additions. Jacket customisation has been practised by fans for nearly as long as heavy metal has existed, and thrives in contemporary metal subcultures, bolstered by online jacket forums and patch trading opportunities. Historically, battle jackets can be connected with WW2 bomber jackets and custom motorcycle patch vests. For fans, battle jackets offer a way to externalise their allegiance to metal and to reinforce a sense of ‘outsider’ status. The jackets also carry highly personal meanings for their wearers and help to articulate a sense of self that extends beyond recreational fandom.