As mentioned in last week’s music industry analysis, metal fans tend to buy discographies. This week, the Billboard charts revealed how much this phenomenon affects physical media sales.
8 CommentsGraveland Announces Hour of Ragnarok Release in Summer 2021
Iconic pagan black metal band Graveland announced yesterday that their latest offering, Hour of Ragnarok, will see release in late spring or early summer of 2021 through Forever Plagued Records on CD, Inferna Profundus Records on vinyl, and The Oath Records on cassette.
5 CommentsTags: Black Metal, graveland
Dawning Releases “Battle of Odin” From Forthcoming Album
Hybrid war/progressive metal band Dawning has issued a new track, “Battle of Odin,” from the forthcoming album Battle of Odin. Check it out at the Dawning Bandcamp!
8 CommentsMusic Industry Considers a New Direction
American music as an industry peaked in 1995, when thanks to the new hip-hop boom, CDs fully taking off, and a record number of Generation X consumers buying music, record sales went through the roof. However, right after that point, something went wrong.
22 CommentsTags: record labels, recording industry, vinyl
Hammerheart Records Re-Issues Wehrmacht in March
COVID-19 cannot slow the interest in retro-metal that has overtaken the industry since 2009. Hammheart Records will release two Wehrmacht 1980s LPs, Shark Attack and Biērmächt, in March, having already made them available for streamling play.
2 CommentsTags: hammerheart records, Speed Metal, wehrmacht
The essence of the hipster: irony
We know that hipsters served as the implement of tearing down metal because once you infiltrate a genre with consciously inauthentic people, it becomes easy to separate aesthetic from its cause, and therefore you make the genre into wallpaper that you can apply to any template, especially the rock/pop variety.
10 CommentsTags: ad busters, christy wampole, douglas haddow, hipsters, ironism, new york times
Metalcore enters its final form: coronavirus
Metalheads suffer greatly for the pain of having a genre that has suffered a coup. At some point, rock assimilated metal, and became modern metalcore: MTV song structure, hardcore style riffs, emo vocals, maybe an occasional metal riff, but basically just pop metal like pop punk was to crustcore and hardcore.
3 CommentsHow Underground Music Captures The Shadow Zeitgeist
We should probably discuss an unpopular relationship: how much of underground music, and wider 1980s and 1990s subculture, came from the unexceptional suburbs.
21 CommentsTags: glenn danzig, misfits, suburbia, underground music
No Iced Earth Albums for Awhile: Jon Schaffer Arrested for Role in Capitol Riot
Jon Schaffer has been taken into custody for his role in the Capitol riot:
15 CommentsTags: capitol riots, iced earth, jailarity, jon schaffer
Asphyx Launches “The Nameless Elite” From Necroceros
A new Asphyx track sounding roughly like a hybrid between The Rack and late-model Bolt Thrower, “The Nameless Elite” runs long with a riff pair and a quick break and detour before returning to the classic death metal cadenced groove.
8 CommentsTags: asphyx, death metal
