At the climax of Jimmy And Stiggs, the latest 16mm-shot splatterfest from raconteur writer/director Joe Begos, a man’s head is split open by an alien parasite. The bug-eyed little monster crawls out of his skull and skitters across the floor, leaving behind a ruined corpse in a pool of blood. Seeing this carnage, the man’s still-living companion puts a pair of pliers in his mouth and tries to extract his own alien embryo implant before the same fate befalls him. The soundtrack to this gnarly bit of extraterrestrial Grand Guignol is “To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me,” the opening song from experimental doom duo the Body’s 2014 album I Shall Die Here, produced by the Haxan Cloak. There’s always been something otherworldly about the Body vocalist Chip King’s whistle-register death howls, so it was especially satisfying for Begos to make the connection explicit against a canvas of alien gore and strobe lights.

In the FromSoftware action RPG Elden Ring, you play as an anonymous, mute character belonging to a caste known as the Tarnished. You’re set loose in the Lands Between, a blighted world that has fallen into chaos. Your mission is to restore the Golden Order and become Elden Lord. In the beginning, you’re a weakling, with poor stats and worse armaments. The first bosses you encounter exist primarily to beat you into the ground, to humble you. The low chime that accompanies FromSoft’s signature “YOU DIED” animation burrows its way into your head through constant repetition. At some point, you realize that you can go somewhere else on the game’s massive, open-world map, so you do. You strengthen yourself in encounters with lesser enemies, and eventually, you return to smash that boss that gave you so much trouble a few hours ago. Repeat that process ad infinitum. That’s Elden Ring.

The godfathers of American thrash have had a rough go of it in the 21st century. The Big Four – that’s Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax, if you’re new here – have released a cumulative 20 studio albums since 2000. What’s the best of those records? It certainly isn’t any of Metallica’s limp, post-St. Anger nostalgia trips. Megadeth buried a handful of great tunes on The World Needs A Hero and The System Has Failed, but they’re both too filler-heavy to recommend without reservation. Slayer’s God Hates Us All has its share of defenders, and I’ll at least entertain the idea that its nü-isms are successful on their own terms. Personally, I hear a band who was afraid of aging out of the arena circuit trying desperately to impress the Slipknot set. I think the answer might be Anthrax’s 2011 album Worship Music, which found them reuniting with their classic-era vocalist Joey Belladonna. When’s the last time you listened to Worship Music? Have you even heard it?

Consider the following, admittedly morbid, parlor game: If every prominent musician who died prematurely had lived to the present day, who would have the best discography? It’s impossible to know, of course, but there aren’t any easy answers. Would Jimi Hendrix have continued inventing new ways to play the electric guitar, or would he have settled into a comfortable career of middling, lucrative blues rock, the way Eric Clapton did? Would Kurt Cobain’s cynical songwriting genius have cut through the noise of the post-grunge yarl era, or would he currently be collaborating with Jelly Roll and Post Malone? Would Bon Scott have just sung on all the AC/DC albums that Brian Johnson ended up singing on, most of which are utterly forgettable? There are no guarantees, least of all when it comes to musicians aging gracefully.

The infamy surrounding the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s has a way of drowning out the music. Thanks to books like Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s Lords Of Chaos and documentaries like Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until The Light Takes Us, even the most marginally informed music fan can probably tell you about the burning of Fantoft Stave Church, the murder of Euronymous, the incarceration of Varg Vikernes, and the circle of young outcasts who hung around Helvete, the record shop in Oslo where “BLACK METAL” is still scrawled on the basement wall, the “T” stylized as an inverted cross. Some smaller percentage of those general music fans has heard anything beyond maybe De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and A Blaze In The Northern Sky; an even smaller group has followed the scene’s survivors through their present-day work. The dark side of Norwegian black metal remains true-crime docuseries fodder, but most of the people who existed in its orbit in the ’90s are simply working musicians today.

Constant evolution is the beating heart of Messa, the band founded in 2014 by vocalist Sara Bianchin, guitarist Alberto Piccolo, bassist Marco Zanin, and drummer Rocco Toaldo. The four friends from northern Italy initially came together to challenge themselves and to stretch their musical boundaries; none of them had ever played doom metal before starting the band. Bianchin came from a punk background, Piccolo was a blues guitarist, Zanin played mostly hard rock, and Toaldo was in multiple established black metal bands. Perhaps inevitably, Messa very quickly became a band that couldn’t be contained by narrow ideas of genre.

In the first decade of the 21st century, when there was a lot of weight being thrown behind the burgeoning “southern sludge” movement, Little Rock’s Rwake (pronounced “wake”) tore off an all-time run of kaleidoscopic, progressive doom metal albums. They were sometimes lumped in with the Savannah circle of bands – Baroness, Kylesa, Black Tusk – but their freewheeling, cosmic sound always felt a little wilder than what their Georgian contemporaries were doing at the time. Rwake’s sophomore album, 2002’s Hell Is A Door To The Sun, was their first masterpiece, an unhinged blend of proggy songcraft, psychedelic exploration, harrowing backwoods atmospherics, and good ol’ southern choogle. Songs like the furious “Unleashing Cosmic Destruction” and the meandering “The Stoner Tree” showcased the band’s awesome range, and the double-headed demon of co-vocalists Chris “CT” Terry and Brittany Fugate served as a breath of fresh air in a scene where workmanlike, monosyllabic grunts were the norm.

Ragne Wahlquist’s memorial service in Stockholm last month had all the solemnity (and the stacked guest list) of a state funeral. Wahlquist, who for nearly 50 years led the heavy metal institution Heavy Load, has been called Sweden’s first true rock star, and Heavy Load is widely considered the country’s first metal band. His death on Jan. 2, three weeks shy of his 70th birthday, left a gaping hole in the scene that he and his brother and bandmate, Styrbjörn Wahlquist, created from whole cloth at the end of the 1970s. After Heavy Load’s initial shot across the bow, Sweden quickly developed into a global hotbed for metal, a reputation it retains to this day. Somebody in Sweden would have gotten around to starting a heavy metal band eventually. But Ragne and Styrbjörn had the vision and the guts to be first.

This is not the Black Market. It couldn’t be the Black Market, because that column was shaped by the shared taste and sensibility of a group of writers whose collective voice I couldn’t emulate if I tried. I’m not Ian or Wyatt or Doug or Aaron or Michael (though I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths, both personally and professionally, with all of them). I’m Brad Sanders, and this is the first edition of a new metal column called Breaking The Oath.