Anyone who followed metalcore in the mid-to-late-2000s and early 2010s (e.g. me) remembers the movement of bands who declared in unison “we’ve heard some extreme metal and want to be like Converge and Entombed.” Whether their persuasion lied with the black metal, sludge or elsewhere, the key for bands who succeeded (Gaza, Trap Them, etc.)…
I’m not gonna do it. I’m not going to spiel about how midwestern hardcore doesn’t get a fair shake and that there’s tons of underappreciated bands out there who can fucking trounce the next big dumb band from the next big dumb city. It’s true, but it’s redundant and (to…
It’s perhaps a testament to the sheer volume of quality extreme music that’s been produced in 2018 that an album as outstanding as The Atlas Moth’s Coma Noir was released early this year to only mild and fleeting fanfare. Yet, here we are, and—while there are certainly worse reasons for…
It has always been a bit strange how something so fast, coarse and outright blistering insists on using the moist mossy woodlands of British Columbia as imagery for their art. Their aesthetic has always been caked in soil and undergrowth amongst the ferns and trees. It’s the lands that the…
Welcome back to our “Best of” column! This isn’t the first time we’ve celebrated twenty year milestones, but this installment is a bit more meaningful for all of us here at Heavy Blog. This list comes a week after we passed 20,000 likes on Facebook, a testament to how much…
With the company I keep, I’m always inundated with music suggestions from friends far and wide. Friends of all genres, trying to get me out of the grind and noise vacuum I’ve been trapped in for a few years. Unfortunately, there’s literally not enough time in the day for me to get really into shoegaze, power pop or Asgardian black metal so I need somewhere to give me all the good stuff in one place. That place is Heavy Blog Is Heavy. No! Shit! That place is Holy Roar Records! On the block today is Germany’s melodic hardcore mega upstarts Giver with Where The Cycle Breaks.
This post has been a long time coming. Heavy Blog has been around for almost 10 years now, and in that time we’ve grown in every possible way. The breadth of music that we cover has grown. We’ve launched new initiatives, such as the podcast Noyan and Eden have made…
Debut albums are an odd beast. Even when they’re good they tend to come with a lot of growing pains, and bands at this early stage in their career tend to lack the self-awareness to really exploit their own potential. Sometimes, this rough, unrefined approach is great. It can often…
One of the biggest selling points in modern metal and heavy music is the culmination of influences. As a community we often find ourselves seeking a band that marries the sounds of two or three other things we like. It’s a creative exercise we all succumb to. Whether the ‘for…
I distinctly remember where I heard Radiohead’s Kid A for the first time. It was on a road trip, driving with my parents and siblings to Yellowstone National Park. The mostly desolate and flat landscape surrounding most of our seemingly interminable drive from Colorado and through some of the most…
