Boston’s Let Us Prey are a band who sound a lot like everyone else, without really sounding like anyone else. Ok, fine, they sound a lot like Nevermore, but also if they sounded more like Iced Earth, or later Strapping Young Lad/mid-period Devin Townsend Band, or even Dream Theater sometimes.…
Hello fellow pit-sters! This month, I thought we could do something a little different. You all know I’ve been playing fast and loose with the schedule of this column, and August will be no different! Fellow thrash Josh Bulleid and I thought we’d introduce ourselves to you all a little…
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast!Regular co-host Cody and I get together to discuss Metallica playing St. Anger stuff live, and then go into an extended conversation about metalcore. Its history, the subgenres, its evolution, and what our favorite bands in the genre are. Mentioning a few artists for SEO purposes: Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, Trivium, August Burns Red, Underoath, Lamb of God, Converge. Then we discuss Avengers Endgame with full spoilers, and this video about it. Enjoy!
Trivium are a band in a unique position. They exploded onto the scene very early on, accruing a lot of fans and haters simultaneously. After putting out an album that helped define a generation, they stepped back from the spotlight a bit, but their most interesting material actually came out…
What goes around, comes around. What’s old is new again. People say this shit all the time because it holds so true. We’ve seen it with just about every style of music, and metal has gotten some real good out of it (see: re-thrash, “occult” metal). While I don’t know exactly what constitutes a genre “revival,” I do know is that if my limited awareness tells me anything about a recent “nu-metal revival,” it’s safe to assume that a “NWOAHM revival” is just around the corner… or emerging. If we are in fact uber-predictable creatures of habit, Nashville’s Dark Hound might be a harbinger of the return of trucker hats, studded belts, and Jagerbombs.
The early 2000s brought us a wealth of riff-worshipping, bone-quaking goodness – what has essentially become the foundation of many current doom, stoner, and sludge metal acts. Bands like Mastodon, High on Fire, and Baroness expanded upon the standard set by metal’s forefathers with more progressive tendencies, expansive arrangements, fiercer presentation, technically demanding performances, and (presumably) better strains of grass. At the same time (and likely benefitting from the same improved… *ahem* genetics), there was also a bubble of traditionalists like The Sword, Wolfmother, and Saviours who made the case that a more conventional approach was worth revisiting, reinvigorating classic sounds for a new generation of headbangers. It’s from this very specific nexus that Australia’s Hypergiant explode, harkening back to familiar territories on both sides of this early-00s coin.
Djent had an explosive entrance into the world of heavy music, around the start of the decade. It was a truly exciting occurrence, with first-wave acts like Periphery, Animals As Leaders and Cloudkicker filtering the technically-driven progressive sound of acts like Meshuggah, Sikth, and those of the budding “Sumeriancore” movement, into something altogether more accessible, while still retaining much of their forebears’ technical and progressive edge. Yet, like most new sub-genres, djent quickly devolved into pastiche and gave way to over saturation—perhaps a little bit quicker than most. Djent, it seems, has had a propperly ballistic trajectory, and—in 2017—as its momentum trails off, it’s hard to get excited about this once-promising phenomenon.
While I cannot make it out to This Is Hardcore this year, I would absolutely love to go. Regardless of the “tough guy” persona perpetuated by many in the scene, there’s some really killer music out there, both from old and new bands. REPS are a band that I was relatively unfamiliar…
Somewhere in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, a movement was brewing. An idea, a sound, a sensation had started to stretch its fingers into metal and to stir, creating new sounds and sensibilities. We are, of course, talking about the rise of metalcore. Whether you deem…
Years after the demise of Headbangers Ball metal bands continue to put out music videos, most destined for a spot on YouTube and maybe some niche cable TV channel. Compare your favorite Heavy Music Video to ours after the jump. For metalheads of a certain age, “Headbangers Ball” was truly…
