Halshug – Drøm

Matt MacLennan
Reviews
Copenhagen's hardcore and metal scenes are one of the hottest around Europe right now - maybe even the world's. Leaving Mercyful Fate, Volbeat, and Aqua to the normies, the city is home to a slew of acts from t... Read More...

Black Anvil – Miles

Jordan Jerabek
Reviews
If there was anything to learn from 2017’s As Was, it was that Black Anvil’s refined handle of melody and attention to dark psychedelic atmospheres were honed as sharp as their enlightened take on black metal.... Read More...

Portrait – Burn the World

Bill Fetty
Reviews
While death and black metal are seeing amazing leaps forward in talent, production, and ability for the denizens of the traditional metal world what we’re seeing from bands such as Enforcer, dawnbringer, Sumerlands, Eternal Champion, and Striker must seem like manna from heaven… or hell, depending upon your preference. One band that has been plugging away at this style, beginning as a bit of a Mercyful Fate worship act and evolving with each new release is Sweden’s Portrait (the band name derives from Diamond’s first solo album, Fatal Portrait). On their latest offering, Burn the World, we see a band who is getting comfortable with their own take on the venerable speed riffs, blazing solos, and soaring vocals of trad metal creating an addictive blend for fans.

The Year of the Beast: How Iron Maiden Heralded the Metal Explosion

Andrew Hatch
Deep Dive
The story of metal is not linear. We didn’t arrive at the mayhem lurking in our Spotify playlists through a measured progression of technique, style, and genre. Rather, the evolution came in leaps and bounds, with dead ends and bursts of growth and pockets of innovation. To continue the evolutionary metaphor: the Cambrian Explosion of metal shot off in the mid 1980’s, as subgenres and geniuses and success combined into a specimen closely resembling much of modern metal. But the growth, although frantic, wasn’t instantaneous; rather, it seemed to expand exponentially from a single source, a catalyst in a chain reaction. That incipient band, the patient zero of metal as we know it today, is Iron Maiden. More precisely, the stratospheric success of The Number of the Beast, with it’s intricate compositions, transgressive lyrics, and trailblazing progressivity, diverged metal from hard rock completely and legitimized metal as a commercial viability, heralding the eruption of metal in the years to follow.