I have a very eclectic music taste, but I do circle around EDM in particular. Lately, however, I’ve been branching out into metal, and recently I wanted to specifically get into the extremer forms of metal. While my EDM tastes still reign supreme, metal has also been screaming alongside it, especially its extremer forms - anything melodic and hard-hitting, I’m guaranteed to like. Bands like Spiritbox and Voyager are good examples for the less extreme side, with Shadow of Intent and Enisum on the extremer sides, with melodeath, atmoblack and metalcore being the genres I circle around.
I wasn’t always into extreme metal, even if I did like some metal, and this metalhead arc only happened very recently! This post basically documents how I even got here as I’m quite amused by the path:
- A dance music label
- A song contest not really known for metal
- And enthusiasts of anthropomorphic animal characters
Early Taste, and Monstercat
I grew up in a very pop and rock oriented household, with European dance music of all sorts being a strong influence on the pop side. Hell, as I was setting this post up I was listening to a album by Scooter, a German hard dance group that enjoyed popularity in the UK. Linkin Park were part of the rock rotation, but it was more Minutes to Midnight than their two previous nu metal offerings and I have a lot of nostalgia for that album. But the one act that has been so ingrained into my tastes is the British pop group Steps, who are well known in the UK and Australia. They initially started as a manufactured gimmick band, with songs like 5, 6, 7, 8, but ended up maturing their sound with a brand of melancholic dance-pop as time went on. A lot of my taste in dance music and melody has been strongly influenced by Steps.
Trance music was also a big part of growing up for me, as well as some hardcore EDM typically from the BEMANI series, particularly Dance Dance Revolution, which Steps were in multiple times in its European version. That laid out the path for me to get into what in the 2010s would become electronic dance music. The term has died out nowadays, but it generally groups a bunch of club genres into one super-group. I got into the typical EDM big-names artists like deadmau5 and Skrillex, but I also found Krewella, who were on the EDM record label Monstercat. They’re quite a juggernaut in dance music nowadays, but Monstercat were more of a tight-knit label when they came across my radar. They were quite the prestigious name back in the day, and if you had a release on Monstercat you basically made it. Krewella - during their initial Rain Man era - had a gritty sound that somehow crossed over well into pop. Listen to songs like Killin’ It and their breakout hit Alive, and you’ll know what I mean. Since then they’ve had a split, meddling with their career from deadmau5, and are still going albeit with an entirely different sound.
So, why am I rattling on about eurodance and EDM? Well, Monstercat was where I got my first taste of symphonic metal, and I feel this was one of the seeds that planted my metalhead tastes.
Varien is an artist who has some releases on Monstercat. You may know them for that, or back in the day for slowing down a Justin Bieber song 800% under their old alias. Their production around the mid-2010s was spectacular, and The Ancient & Arcane is a great chill album, but they also published a trilogy of tracks on Monstercat known as the Valkyrie trilogy. I didn’t realise it back then, since it was very much an electronic production, but Monstercat had basically published a bunch of symphonic metal out of nowhere. And I loved it. It also helped that I was also getting into Undertale (which itself had some electronically produced symphonic metal) and I felt a connection between the two somehow, despite them being very unrelated.
Unfortunately this didn’t really result in me diving deeper into metal, and frankly I would’ve called them hard rock at the time. Frankly, metal was not really a thing in my music vocabulary unless you pointed at Linkin Park. Since then, however, I joined Rate Your Music, a site that’s basically full of music nerds. I would actually take metal a bit more seriously, but it still wouldn’t grab me that much in comparison to a lot of the EDM and pop I loved. I also have to give honorable mention to Australian prog metal band Dyssidia, who I found from the YouTuber DankPods. Hope’s Remorseful Retreat is an amazing track, only made better by the fact the music video was filmed in DankPods’ warehouse. But even then, my taste in metal wouldn’t really expand that much - that is, until 2023, when the UK got an opportunity of what felt like a lifetime.
Enter Eurovision
Americans tend to get confused about Eurovision and don’t get it, so I’ll explain it here. The Eurovision Song Contest (colloquially known as Eurovision) is a competition where broadcasters representing countries send a song of their choice either by internally selecting or holding a national show, with the winning country getting hosting duties the following year. It’s gone through major political turmoil especially nowadays, with the genocide of Palestinians and Israel’s presence staining the contest, but back in 2023 there was loads of optimism despite the politics, which that year were focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I am getting ahead of myself though, since this story starts in 2021, the first post-COVID iteration of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Eurovision 2021
The Dutch broadcasters did an amazing job, and it was a very jam-packed and eventful Eurovision. The UK ended up with egg on its face, receiving zero points from both juries and the televote - people point to Brexit being the cause, but really it was because the song did not resonate with the European audience. The BBC have also been in a Eurovision slump since the 2000s and doesn’t really know how Eurovision actually works. No political conspiracy theories here. The UK just did not compete in a competitive manner this year, since Eurovision 2021 had a stacked line-up and was oddly high quality compared to the past two decades, it was like Eurovision finally matured while keeping its ethos. Some examples include:
- Amazingly performed ballads from France and Switzerland
- A folk-infused trance banger from Ukraine
- Iceland’s funky tribute to the singer’s wife
- The rebellious rock song from Italy who won that year - funnily enough, Måneskin was the reason I got into Beastars and now have a gay crush on Legoshi.
As you can see, the BBC has not caught up with the times when it came to Eurovision.
However, what got me personally clocked into Eurovision for probably the first time was Finland, who sent the nu metal band Blind Channel with their anthem Dark Side.
This was the sort of song I wanted in my life at the time - the coronavirus pandemic that plagued 2020, the lockdowns, the response from the UK government, and social distancing fucked up my mental health. I was absolutely fucking bitter and angry, and this was exactly a song I needed, coming from Eurovision of all places. The focus on going “fuck it”, living in the moment and not caring if you were dying, in the context of getting blackout drunk and partying? That was something I felt I could relate to as someone who does not drink alcohol. The aggressive nu metal production and instrumentation was also what I need at that time. However, for me to take metal truly seriously, we’d have to go to 2023, and have a look Down Under.
Eurovision 2023, Voyager, and Beyond
Since Ukraine - the winners of Eurovision 2022 - couldn’t host Eurovision in 2023 due to the war, the mantle was given to the United Kingdom instead, who were 2nd in the competition. This was also a major point for the UK in Eurovision, who went from absolute humiliation for the 2nd time, to getting 1st with the jury, 5th in the televote and 2nd overall. Say what you want about Space Man, but Sam Ryder’s performance was great, he was exactly what the BBC needed, and he gave the UK a massive amount of needed hope. Eurovision 2023 was hosted in Liverpool, and even with all the problems Eurovision has nowadays, I hold it deep in my heart, particularly because of the Australian entry that year.
Australia sent progressive metal five-piece Voyager, who have been going since the late 90s. They combine progressive metal with synthpop, the latter being a major favourite of mine as I’ve grown up. They get compared a lot by metalheads to Depeche Mode - a synthpop band that I also really like. Though initially, I didn’t really think the song was that great - the studio version sounded muddy, and my EDM taste was very much used to more polished mixing. I had it at a 6/10 at the time - I appreciated the writing but the mixing left more to be desired, but I thought, “let’s see how they fare at Liverpool.”
They were fucking amazing. Absolutely the best performance on that night. The mixing problems were much less of a problem here, they nailed the vocals, and the charisma of the entire band absolutely shone through the screen. It oozed loads of fun, which is a bit funny considering the last metal song I praised. And then it smacks you in the face with a metal breakdown. This was the moment where not just my Eurovision hyperfixation set itself, but a taste for more metal came in. I was getting hyperfixated on Voyager specifically, watching interviews and absorbing whatever knowledge I could, buying whatever CDs I could too. The Eurovision hyperfixation also resulted in me checking out the contest’s back catalog, and when checking out songs from 2018, I found out Hungary decided to send the band AWS.
Now, I don’t understand Hungarian at all, but this song went fucking hard. They even managed to sneak in a key change, what was seen as a common trope with Eurovision pop songs. This was probably the gateway for me getting into metalcore. Unfortunately the lead singer has since passed away from leukemia but AWS is still going on with a new vocalist - I actually have their latest album from 2024, which came with a Hungarian magazine. Voyager is also dealing with cancer, with lead singer Danny Estrin’s cancer being terminal. I would love to see both of these bands live whenever I can. Eurovision also seems to be carrying on with metal to this day, with Serbia taking the mantle in 2026. While I am boycotting the show, I have decided to check the songs out at least, and it turns out that Serbia decided to choose LAVINA, with their slow and brooding gothic metal track “Kraj mene”.
With all that said and done, Eurovision has helped me realise that maybe I am into metal. That also meant I wanted more. Extreme metal was still a massive blind spot for me - I went into the deep end without learning how to swim thanks to RYM’s recommendations, tried Cryptopsy’s “None So Vile”, and hated it. That’s where the next phase comes in.
When Furries Got Me Into Metal
Eurovision came and went in a week on May 2023. Later, in July 2023, I would join Bluesky. I was mainly on the Fediverse at this time, and I was trying to get my friends off of Elon Musk’s Twitter and onto anything on the Fediverse. However, that failed, and Bluesky managed to grab a whole load of my friends despite its invite-only nature at the time, and so I decided to follow along. I had opted-in to furryli.st, who essentially manages an opt-in feed for furries to network with each other (if you need an intro to furries: people who like anthropomorphic animal characters). This is where I would meet someone who is now one of my best and closest friends. He’d helped me warm up to VRChat, eventually use voice chat and overall become more confident, and we rant about tech quite a lot. One thing he’s been doing for a while has been throwing me extreme metal that he’d think I’d like.
Now, after checking out what Eurovision had to offer for metal, I wanted to try and break into extreme metal. It was a land I seldom explored, and I wanted to find something I liked in the genre, and he was eager to help. I told him what my tastes outside metal were, and what I didn’t like from the extreme metal I had listened to, and throughout the course of our friendship, he’s been sending me extreme metal he finds and that I like. There’s a lot that has been sent throughout the years, but there are two extreme metal bands I wanted to highlight: Shadow of Intent and Enisum.
Shadow of Intent tends to circle around melodic death metal (melodeath) and deathcore. I liked the first album I listened to from them, which was Melancholy, but Imperium Delirium was when it really set in. The meaty guttural vocals and well-mixed fast production, and the atmosphere of the album just made it overall an amazing package, with Feeding the Meatgrinder being a particular highlight.
Meanwhile, Enisum swings the other way, going for atmosphere over trying to be Loud but still fitting in the extreme metal mold nonetheless. They’re a band in the atmospheric black metal genre, with nature being a strong theme of theirs. Arpitanian Lands was so amazing that I ended up buying it on CD, making it the first extreme metal album I own physically.
That wasn’t the only friend who also got me into more metal, however. I played Save the Cat by Pendulum, a drum and bass track sided with metalcore vocals, and another friend played a track by Canadian metal band Spiritbox called The Void, and I loved it. It was that hard-hitting yet also melodic and pop-sounding metal that just goes really well for me. But that won’t be my favourite Spiritbox song, however - that one has to go to Jaded. Ever since then, I’ve gotten tickets to see Spiritbox, and saw Pendulum live for the first time last year - the energy was great even if Rob’s vocals were a bit shaky.
Ending Notes
From there, well, I’ve been too busy and ADHD to find some of my own admittedly, but since then Apple Music has incurred a habit of suggesting some of the harder and extremer metal to me under my “New Releases” playlist. This playlist has, in Apple’s words, new music from artists the algorithm thinks I’ll like. It’s not like Spotify’s “Release Radar” which is mostly based on artists it knows you already know - Apple’s algorithms tend to favour discovery over familiarity in general. Well, it’s now decided I should get into more metal, and every week I get some good metal from a band I had never heard of. I have seen people criticise Apple Music’s algorithm for being worse than Spotify’s, but honestly, Apple has been pushing a genre I’ve been wanting to get into. It’s part of why I like Apple Music over Spotify. If only the Windows client didn’t suck ass though.
Metal was a genre I thought I’d never get into proper, but with the right seeds and the right people, I feel I’ve truly come to appreciate metal properly, I’ve become a metalhead. It still feels weird, even now, given how recently I became one compared to when I got into EDM, but that should settle, especially when I start trying to look for things on my own terms.
One genre I want to try and understand more as well is rap/hip-hop. I feel I’m only scratching the surface on it, and I’ll admit sometimes I feel it’s not made for me (and that is completely fine), but nonetheless I know my tastes pretty well, here: good, rhythmic production + aggressive/gritty vocals. Something like The Blacker the Berry by Kendrick Lamar would be a good example.