#tldr i made a heavy metal playlist

[flowersforvax]

can we ask about your metal journey? as a light dabbler in metal i'm curious as to your favorites so far! artists and sub genres are so varied, it's kind of hard to guess

I was so excited to talk about my journey discovering heavy metal this got longer than i expected (and also I kind of misunderstood your message at first which is why I didn't just... list some bands i like whoops) so this is going behind a read more 💀

Okay so. We're gonna get the embarrassing part out of the way first and i'm gonna admit that I started listening to Metal because Stranger Things fanfiction kept name dropping bands and songs that I just had no reference for.

So! the intro for me! was Dio! because that's the big name on the back of Eddie Munson's battle vest! Still with me? Great! (You wanna know which song I listened to first??? It was Rainbow in the Dark. because I'm a predictable little fruit lmao. great song though)

I did absolutely fall in love with Ronnie James Dio's voice and also the way every youtube comment section in relation to him has someone mentioning what a great guy he was within the first ten comments (like. "We had a conversation on the street after the concert and when we met again five years later he remembered our names"-great. wtf?? How was that guy real??)

Just shooting from the hip some of my favorites of Dio (and bands RJD was part of) include Holy Diver, Heaven & Hell, Straight Through The Heart, Stargazer, Children of The Sea, The Last In Line, Don't talk to Strangers, Neon Nights Gates of Babylon, Die Young, [...]

And then I was like, well I can't listen to just Dio, right?? But I was also kind of frozen because there is SO MUCH metal out there! So I did the basic bitch thing and listened to the spotify Metal Essentials playlist which had me go "...Judas Priest? Why does that sound familiar...?" And it was, of course, because at some point I'd seen a tumblr post mentioning Rob Halford coming out in the 90s and how it was ridiculous that anyone could have listened to "Grinder" in 1980 and thought that song was in any way heterosexual. So, like the predictable little fruit that I am, I decided to work my way through Judas Priest and i'm not... close to done (it's almost like bands who started making music in the seventies and are still making music today have made a lot of music...! I'm not overwhelmed or anything!)

The Hellion/Electric Eye is a religious experience to me. No song about a totalitarian surveillance state should be allowed to fuck that hard. And YET-!

Sidenote: It's fascinating how exposing myself to Heavy Metal has changed my perception... of Heavy Metal. Like. The reason I never listened to it was because I had a very specific idea of what Metal music sounds like (which is! ridiculous! now that I know the amount of sub genres included in Metal!) but I won't lie: there's still a shit ton of metal that just sounds straight up grating to me. But! there are also songs that I love now (Painkiller by Judas Priest comes to mind) that I did not enjoy at all at first, so who knows? Maybe in another three months I'll listen to Napalm Death, even though right now I don't feel like Grindcore and I will ever get along like that.

At some point then I watched some youtube videos of Elizabeth at The Charismatic Voice reacting to Heavy Metal. I genuinely don't remember why I started doing this but I found her delightful and it was fun to watch someone else be completely new to Metal.

And still! There's a lot of metal I just don't really... get. Which I noticed when I tried listening to the official Wacken 2022 playlist to blast myself with as many bands as possible that are popular right now (to take a break from what I was doing before, imprinting on three heavy metal bands from the 80s and making them my comfort zone lol). But as i said, a lot of it still just sounds like... noise to me. But I want to get it, you know? I feel like I'm so close to getting it. So when that didn't work out I did the basic bitch thing again and searched shit like "intro to heavy metal" and "new metalhead guide" on YouTube until I landed on BangerTV's "How to get into Heavy Metal" series which I like a lot. He explains the differences in subgenres (SO MANY SUBGENRES) and gives examples of that genre that are easy to get into for people new to metal. The videos are, hilariously, directed at people who already listen to Metal who want to get other people into it, but that didn't really make a difference to me. He also once mentioned an artist as "the guy we don't talk about because of the racism" (paraphrased) which is nice. Always good to see you landed on the right page lol

And that's- that's where i'm at in my metal journey right now. I watched one of the BangerTV videos which made me want to check out Atmospheric Black Metal (verdict: weirdly? Relaxing?) and here we are. You, me and this metal playlist i started adding to whenever i really liked a song. It feels basically empty so far but it's also... somehow four hours long:

If you find anything new on there you like or if you have a recommendation, I'd love to hear it! 🤩