Welcome to Pitchfork’s 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 community. Below you’ll find five metal bands that speak to the power of unity in their music.
From its earliest days, metal was built as a community. It’s a genre created by people who felt left out by an increasingly glamorized and watered-down era in rock music; a haven for those who felt voiceless and unrepresented. Like many communities, it can quickly turn into a clique (or in certain subgenres, a mob). That’s a symptom of its closeness and stubborn, sometimes dangerous, adherence to tradition. But as it has aged and gone in and out of fashion, many metal communities have remained tightknit and, in some cases, more embracing of new ideas.
Whether it’s a foundational metal label expanding into different genres or Ozzfest incorporating wedding ceremonies, metal in the 21st century has found creative ways to achieve harmony through heaviness. The internet has also helped the genre harken back to its early days of tape-trading, with new bands spreading their music widely, unbounded by financial or regional limitations. For better or worse, no matter your interests, you can easily find people looking for exactly the same things as you, from novelties like black metal that sounds like video games and power-metal renditions of Disney songs to much more dangerous territory. While metal spawned some of the most insular communities in music, it has also been one of the most historically alienating—particularly to outsiders who don’t fit in with its assumed description of “outsiders.”
In recent years, many members of the metal community have used its uniting principles to not only to address the genre’s problems, but also to make changes for the better. Since 2014, Chase Ambler of Deafest and Paul Ravenwood of Twilight Fauna have been issuing compilation albums through their Black Metal Alliance to promote charities voted upon by contributing acts. Among the beneficiaries of their Crushing Intolerance series have been IRQR (Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees) and Women on Waves. The label stresses “equal rights for all life,” but the music values pure death above all else. It shows that metal doesn’t have to sacrifice its escapist principles to promote real world issues: how you can fight for solidarity while listening to a song called “Hang My Remains from the Crescent Moon.”
An Out Recordings is another gem in the community, run by Oakland native Anna Vo. Vo identifies her label as anarchist, queer, feminist, and anti-racist, and she prioritizes extreme music from marginalized groups. The label’s most recent release, Ragana’s You Take Nothing, is one of five highlights from this month: music that builds on the genre’s power for bringing people together, without turning a blind eye to those who have been turned away.
Ragana - You Take Nothing
The fourth album from Oakland duo Ragana, You Take Nothing is a slow, pulverizing tour de force from band members Maria and Nicole. Along with the heavy pulse of Nicole’s drums—which alternate between black metal blast beats and stately post-rock sprawl—Maria can conjure possessed rage within the tiniest spaces. On the title track, that brief moment between “take” and “nothing” is where all the magic happens: the tension in her voice rises as the music comes crashing down around her. There’s no time to brace for impact—her words hit harder with each repetition.
The band lists the total destruction of capitalism among their influences, and it’s palpable when these songs take aim at outdated power structures—within metal and beyond. “I think we both have a real 'fuck you' attitude about it,” Maria explained of the band’s sense of community. “I want the metal scene to grow and become more diverse and to feel safer and to not support fascist bands anymore, but I don't know how to do it, you know?” You Take Nothing is their massive step forward.
Lich King - The Omniclasm
With their latest album, Massachusetts thrash metal band Lich King offer a state of the union on metal fandom. Of course, they pair it with enough vicious solos and memorable riffs to remind you that the sound of metal in 2017 doesn’t have to be all that different from 1987. It also helps that they have a sense of humor about it. In “Cut the Shit,” they call out elitism in the genre (“Judging people for not being true enough/Like you were born with your eBay high-tops”). Moments later, they present their thesis: “Metal’s supposed to be fun!”
It’s hard not to have a good time with these songs. “Preschool Cespool” explores the grim, frostbitten reality of parenting, with vocalist Tom Martin complaining about driving his kid to school in his best mock-Alice Cooper sneer. In “Crossover Songs Are Too Damn Short,” he makes a 70-second case for the virtues of patience. Some tracks take political aim, while others are pure fantasy. But it all feels like lived-in wisdom, and it’s infectious enough to make you smile through the corpse paint.
Extremity - Extremely Fucking Dead
Extremity is a new supergroup collecting members from the highly prolific Pacific Northwest scene, including Agalloch, VHOL, Vastum, and Repulsion. Their debut album, the excellently titled Extremely Fucking Dead, goes down in under 30 minutes, and it’s a glorious explosion of well-worn ideas. While breaking absolutely no new ground, Extremely Fucking Dead does something maybe more impressive: it finds new urgency in some of the most traditional sounds in death metal (some Bolt Thrower in the rhythms, a whole lot of Chuck Schuldiner in the melodies), oozing with dread over pummeling rhythms. It’s the sound of four like-minded peers joining forces to do one thing extremely well.
Loss - “The Joy of All Who Sorrow”
“We wrote this song together, in a circle, facing each other,” guitarist Mike Meacham told Decibel about the latest track from Loss’s upcoming album. “The Joy of All Who Sorrow” is a beautiful and intricate composition, showing that the Nashville death/doom quartet has only grown tighter in the six years since their last LP. Spanning 11 minutes, it marks the group’s first song in which all four members share vocal duties, embedding the music with a sweet sense of brotherhood. But this is still Loss we’re talking about, and “The Joy of All Who Sorrow” is no “We Are the World.” The song, which opens their new album, begins with the members bellowing together—gruesomely, as if in pain—before a spoken word section about “the literal worship of death and nothingness of being.” It’s a bummer, for sure, but an immersive kind of bummer.
Voice of Baceprot - “The Enemy of Earth Is You”
“VOB was born out of anxiety,” explain the members of Indonesia’s teen metal trio Voice of Baceprot. “We are anxious to see the helplessness of adolescents whose moral is increasingly occupied and increasingly lost.” It’s not just Google Translate making them sound wise: this band vastly transcends their years (all three members are 16) in sound and spirit. At the suggestion of a high school teacher, the group started playing frantic, heavy music together in 2014 and have recently shared their first original track. With “The Enemy of Earth Is You,” they’ve composed a fiery protest song that offers metal at its most primal and furious. The group takes influence from massive groups like Slipknot or Pearl Jam—bands who developed a sound from elements of heavy music and then found a ways to bring it to arenas. And while they are at the very beginning of their career, Voice of Baceprot already have the guts and the vision necessary to explode the genre into something universal—using their voice to speak to anyone who feels pissed-off and anxious after looking at the world.