Four years ago this month, Jonas Åkerlund’s film, Lords of Chaos, made a brief but loud noise in cinemas. Inspired by the book of the same name, which chronicled the rise of the infamous Norwegian black metal scene of the 1990s, the film particularly focused mainly on the crimes of the band, Mayhem, and evoked […]
Perennial Motörhead frontman and co-founder Lemmy Kilmister seemed like a living contradiction. He played high-decibel, high-octane music, yet conversations with him were nuanced at a quieter volume. His band spurred the development of thrash metal, but he did not consider his band a metal outfit and disdained mosh pits. He once told me that he […]
Right from the outset, Birmingham, England’s own Black Sabbath proved themselves to be a very special musical entity. While various groups had started laying down the foundations for hard rock and metal on both sides of the Atlantic, Sabbath are considered to be the first true heavy metal band, and their self-titled debut from 1970 […]
Judas Priest’s Painkiller was more than just a comeback album for the iconic British group. It was a bold new statement of intent and a record that would prove to be highly influential on the European metal scene in the early 1990s. The quintet showed that they still had plenty of fire left and could […]
Deftones took a rather winding and deliberate path to greatness, almost sneaking up on music fans who prematurely pegged the Sacramento, California natives as just another nu metal band based on their 1995 debut album, Adrenaline, and overlooked the abundant signs of a singular vision emerging on 1997’s still somewhat inconsistent sophomore album, Around the […]
When Megadeth unleashed their first LP, Killing Is My Business … and Business Is Good!, on June 12, 1985, they were the last of thrash metal’s Big Four — the platinum-selling pace-setters, completed by Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax — to debut. However, unlike other late arrivals to the thrash-metal mosh pit, such as Exodus, Overkill, […]
