Welcome to Pitchfork’s new monthly metal column, where we’ll guide you through the genre’s new music and various happenings with an eye towards a specific theme. This month’s theme is tradition. Below you will find a rundown of February’s notable metal stories: how bands paid homage to the past, built a legacy atop it, or failed to learn from it.
On the first night of February, I watched Moon Tooth frontman John Carbone crawl through the audience at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus like a rat on a subway platform. He repeatedly scurried out of the room, occasionally returning with new props to play with—a roll of duct tape, a spare drum head—while the band carried on flawlessly and furiously. You got the sense that they’d all been bottled up all day, just itching to get on stage and explode—an energy they easily transferred to the crowd.
The show was a joint bill with Astronoid, a Massachusetts group that combines Mew’s dramatic prog-pop with Boris’ riff-heavy low-end doom to triumphant yet disquieting heights. After their set, I felt as though I’d witnessed a massive spaceship take flight on a starry evening. The two acts could not have carried themselves more differently, but what they had in common was an effective dismissal of the old-school tradition of metal. Astronoid, with their serious and beautiful anthems, and Moon Tooth, with their oddball energy, each twisted the history of metal into something new and distinctly their own.
Metal has an unwavering allegiance to its past, and it’s visible in nearly every aspect of the genre. On a surface level, looking at a band’s press photos often will reveal artists literally wearing their influences on their sleeves, while their logo may nod in a more knowing way. Is it gruesome like Death? Illegible like Demilich? Spacey like Voivod? Of course, a band’s sound can communicate the same well-versed metal devotion as their vintage tees and fan-fiction logos, in a more substantial way that can lead to success. The flipside is that there are often accusations of betrayal lobbed as metal bands shift sounds. To evolve as a metal band, you often have to either swerve into different subgenres (like Darkthrone in their crust punk phase), or simply try to increase the levels of intensity. To do otherwise is to risk alienating your audience (like Celtic Frost’s notoriously clean and poppy Cold Lake), or end up falling into obscurity, making the same records over and over again to a decreasing fanbase.
This month has seen a number of artists effectively paying homage to the glory days. Finnish crossover thrashers Foreseen and Florida death metal traditionalists Gruesome each announced new releases with songs made no less exciting by the fact that they sound like they could have been written at any point over the past three decades. On the excellent Greyhaze label, an obscure 1989 album by the Mist, Phantasmagoria, received a much-welcome reissue. It’s a record whose vicious odes to flying-saucers would be just as powerful if they had emerged mysteriously on Bandcamp today—and for a lot of younger listeners, they might as well have. Many of this month’s greatest moments came from artists sticking to tradition, and innovating in subtler ways.
But not learning from the past also led to some of the month’s worst metal moments. At the Grammys, Metallica once again attempted to freshen up their sound by adding a new voice into the mix. Vaguely similar to the fascinating failure of Lulu, Lady Gaga’s turn as Metallica singer spoke to more than just the band’s misguided attempts to switch things up. The song they performed, “Moth Into Flame,” is one of the finer moments fromHardwired… To Self-Destruct—an album largely heard as Metallica’s best in ages because of how much it sounds like their old stuff. The performance, however well intentioned, was marred by technical difficulties: James Hetfield accidentally offering a perfect metaphor as he shouted desperately into a non-working mic. “I haven’t seen him like that in 20 years,” Lars Ulrich said of Hetfield’s outrage after the show. Maybe that’s good news for fans who heard Hardwired as a harbinger of more pissed-off things to come. Sometimes the whole point of innovating is just so you can get back to doing what you do best.
Power Trip // Nightmare Logic
No band has brought metal’s past to the present quite like Power Trip, the Texas crossover greats whose 2013 debut Manifest Decimationalready feels like a genre classic. Their new album Nightmare Logic thankfully doesn’t toy with their winning formula. While listening to their music can sometimes be an exercise in name-that-riff, Power Trip are further defining themselves as a band whose classicist tendencies—those squealing solos, those shout-along choruses, the very fury of it all—only make them that much more vital. Nightmare Logic serves up eight of their best songs to date—compositions more intense, multifaceted, and exciting than anything they’ve attempted before. It’s the sound of a band demanding to be positioned among the giants of metal, and ending up one step closer to permanently earning their place.
Judas Priest // Turbo: 30th Anniversary Edition
With extreme devotion—as metal often demands of its fans—comes extreme scrutiny. As such, most metal acts have at least one divisive album that can light up listeners with rage for years to come. For Judas Priest, it’s Turbo, the 1986 album that found them synthing things up and reaching for the cheap seats (at the Def Leppard show). It’s an album that raises a number of contentious questions, chief among them the very possibility for a metal band to modernize their sound without losing their identity. On this 30th anniversary 3xCD deluxe edition, which pairs the album with a vicious Kansas City performance from ’86, those questions seem moot. Turbo has aged well, sequencing some of the band’s most immediately gratifying songs in a way that highlights the mainstream potential lurking behind their music from the beginning. Faced with the challenge of translating these tracks to a stadium full of Priest fans, Rob Halford seems even more charged up to deliver. The songs explode in this setting—which is what they were built to do.
Dool // “Golden Serpents”
One of the last decade’s great metal acts, the Devil’s Blood, took inspiration from ’70s proto-metal, when satanism and the occult began showing up more fully formed in the riffs and choruses of rock music. Dool, a band that’s risen from the ashes of the Devil’s Blood, transplants their rhythm section to a punchier setting but takes a similar route to the netherworlds.Their recent debut Here Now, There Then is a dynamic listen that ranges from epic doom to gothy alt-rock, with each song feeling like the towering centerpiece of a completely different album. “Golden Serpents” is its finest moment, a psychedelic burner with otherworldly roots. The song is about “escapism through hallucinogens,” Dool’s Ryanne van Dorst said, after a friend recounted her visions of golden snakes in trees—an image that reminded the singer of her own teenage drug use, prompted by small-town boredom. “Golden Serpents” tells van Dorst’s story with a sense of both dread and catharsis, the visions only growing stronger with the passing of time.
Thou // “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”
“Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” one of the standouts on Neil Young’s 1970 classic After the Goldrush, is structured like a subtle mood swing. The words don’t change but the music does, so that by the end, the mysterious, minor-key drama has evolved into an uplifting folk song. On the benefit compilation Many Waters, Louisiana sludge lords Thou add their own gnarled perspective to the track. It serves as the centerpiece to the collection, which the band curated along with Chicago label Thrill Jockey, to benefit victims of the Louisiana floods of 2016. Let it serve as a case study in metal’s ability to communicate both pain and hope. Things might turn around, they suggest, but burning castles is still pretty brutal.
The Death Archives: Mayhem 1984 - 1994
A gorgeous coffee table book issued by Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace imprint, The Death Archivestraces the tale of misfortuned Norwegian black metal icons Mayhem. It sheds light on their early days up through the 1991 suicide of vocalist Dead, the 1993 murder of guitarist Euronymous at the hands of Burzum’s Varg Vikernes, and the aftermath. While the story it tells is achingly dark, The Death Archives is filled with vivid photographs and insightful anecdotes of a more general nature. “It was bloody tiring to drag those big, spiked clubs all around Europe. They weighed so many pounds, were pointy, and no fun to have in your backpack,” goes one memorable passage, “We got a lot of questions every damn time we were crossing a bloody border. And we had two of them, even worse.”
Now performing their 1994 masterpiece De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas in full at shows with an updated lineup, Mayhem is putting their twist on the aging rock band narrative: celebrating their history without sacrificing their darkness. In fact, more artists should take note on how to age this gracefully. As Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud writes in the foreword, “Mayhem were never interested in exploitation. Our personal experiences did not take place in order to sell more records or gain media exposure and that won’t change now.” The past is alive on every page of this book.