Trendkillers #4: Album Birthdays are Metal’s Eulogy

Few things portray a grimmer outlook for the future of heavy metal music than what’s conveyed through pictures like this:

Upon seeing an article like that, I immediately hear the voice of an obnoxious elderly family member screeching “Aww my little Testament- The New Order has gotten so big! Woww, 30 years old! I can’t believe it. It feels like it was just yesterday when you were just a little thrash metal album, now you’re a big boy! Give grandma a kiss!”

But truthfully, a powerful statement is made by this culture in metal media of publishing article after article on what album “turns 10, 20, 30 today.”  You can bait more clicks by covering popular albums than covering newer ones, and so most of the MMSM (metal mainstream media) tries to drive up traffic by celebrating album birthdays.  Have we really reached this point in metal’s evolution where we’re longing for the past so much that we waste long articles on the fact that albums came out on the date the article was written?  Are metal’s journalists so bad that they just can’t come up with anything more creative or more interesting than this?  Is it really impossible to portray metal through non-metal writings?

If you’re a “metal journalist” and the best you can do is “…And Justice for All turned 30 today!” it’s probably time to just embrace your male feminism and start writing about cats.  For the other young writers out there, take notice of how radical underground journalism in the form of classic zines drove the death/black metal underground by rebelling against mainstream journalism’s redundant ramblings on hair metal and NWOBHM.  Laugh at articles celebrating mainstream metal birthdays and shame the piss out of their authors publicly.

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16 thoughts on “Trendkillers #4: Album Birthdays are Metal’s Eulogy”

  1. Brave Nigger says:

    RIP Metal
    1969 – 1994

  2. Coolest Monkey In The Jungle says:

    That looks like a “captcha” where you have to click on all the true metal album(s) in order to read the real article

  3. Retired Col. Lewis L. Millett says:

    1. no “Hell Awaits” but ok sure whatever
    2. showed true colors with “Escape”
    3. 2 Minutes to Watery Hard Rock
    4. huh??? baptized in sperm of Iommi so honorary metal?
    5. only Legacy demo is real
    6. my bayonet is thirsty for dirty stinking hippie pearl jam

  4. Dirk says:

    It was a perfect storm.

    Right when DM was raging in the mid-nineties, suddenly a lot of bands (like Fear Factory and Vader) put out crappy techno remixes of their albums. Burzum did a whole album of just crappy keyboards. These should not have been in the metal section.

    Mayhem and Emperor couldn’t match their early efforts. Meanwhile, previously good bands like Hypocrisy and Paradise Lost (among others) put out increasingly sell-out style metal. And black metal bands like Enslaved started to do more lame ‘Viking styled singing’. Metallica went alternative. Diamond was assassinated. Sepultura started making lame albums and spin-offs after Chaos. David Vincent was out of Morbid Angel for a while if I remember correctly too.

    1. T. Desecration says:

      http://assets.blabbermouth.net/media/evil3.jpg

      Laugh at the tragedies / Mock with disrespect

  5. Nuclear Hellcult says:

    What do those Slayer, Metallica, and Maiden albums have in common? They’re worse than all their previous albums, but better than all their following albums.

  6. Coward says:

    Now is a good time to shutdown this sorry ass site.

  7. Nuclear Hellcult says:

    Everyone knows metal injection is untrve so why flog a dead horse by paying attention to what they write?
    Although literally flogging a dead horse sounds pretty fucking cool.

  8. Mister Syre says:

    What’s more useless, writing about albums turning 30 or writing about the journalists who are writing about albums truning 30?

  9. deathevokation says:

    You guys are just pissed that the article didn’t expound on how ‘Cold Lake’ inspired Burzum, Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Emperor.

  10. Marc Defranco says:

    In other news there is a reissue for classic heavy/speed/power metal band Heavy Load – Stronger Than Evil

  11. Rainer Weikusat says:

    Daniel Maarat’s articles on album birthdays were quite good even despite I usually disagreed with his positive opinions.

  12. HELL V.666 says:

    10 most relevant almbums in Metal
    100 best paid singers :/
    10000 metal bitch !!
    100000000 metal magazines, unimportant
    it sounds like metal hammer, another shit that should burn inside a church!!

  13. harry, the guy with the snake tattoo on his face says:

    we want lobster hand porn

  14. Falsehammer says:

    I’ve already accepted the death of metal, and I’ve been pissing on its grave ever since most of the new shit is derivative garbage anyway.

    1. poopy underpants from india says:

      you accept death metal, you will accept death, you accpet metal , Resistance is futile
      accept
      accept accept Fast as a shark

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