A Comprehensive Guide to Heavy Metal Genres for Non-Metalheads
If you've never willingly chosen to listen to heavy metal music at any point in your life, you’re in the right place.
If you've constantly chosen to listen to heavy metal music every day of your life since you've first heard Enter Sandman on AM radio in 1992, you’re also in the right place.
Whether you know it or not, you're about to become a scholar of the devil's music. Over the next months (or years), I am going to give you an unofficial history of heavy metal through a series of intricate historical, cultural and sonic guides to the multiplicity of genres and crossovers it has created (and keeps creating) since Tony Iommi first laid eyes on a guitar. I'm going to start before that even and I don't know when I’m going to end. This is going to be systematic as shit.
A journey from pre-Black Sabbath days to Gorenoise and beyond.
Don't worry. I'm going to take it slow and keep it enjoyable. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you don't want this expertise, but you want to know one of the secret truths of the universe? People don't know what they want until you give it to them. So I'm going to give you the power of knowledge. Use it well. Whether you're looking to understand the extreme tastes of extreme people or explain your own extreme tastes to people you love, you'll find everything you need below :
Metal Adjacent
Core Genres
New Wave of British Heavy Metal
Hybrid Genres
Why am I starting this crazy project? Three reasons: a) I'm looking for reasons to get absurdly nerdy about metal b) Most guides to metal genres exist in the form of books or videos. They’re finite and exist within logistical constraints. This site is a collection of ones and zeroes, so I can go to town like others before me couldn’t and c) metalheads are terrible keepers of their own history. If it was only for us, Slayer would be recording Seasons in the Abyss over and over and history would’ve stopped in 1990.
This is happening with or without you, dear normies. But we'd ideally need your casual (or devoted) interest to make it work. Let’s fucking gooooo.
