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.

You might have picked up on the Mercyful Fate reference in the name of this column. I hope that signals a few things about what will make Breaking The Oath distinct from the Black Market. First, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool devotee of classic heavy metal. I love bands who project what Rob Halford once called “the power and the majesty amidst the blood and steel.” I didn’t get into metal through extreme metal, nü metal, or punk; I got here through Iron Maiden. That’s going to be reflected in some of what I write about, though I also love a lot of the oddball stuff that Ian and the gang covered in the Black Market. I’ll try to strike a balance.

Secondly, and perhaps paradoxically given my previous point, I think metal orthodoxy can be stultifying, and while I did take a proverbial oath when I started listening to this stuff, I’m more than happy to break it. I’m listening to the new Deafheaven album as I write this, and I think it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than 99% of trve kvlt black metal that’s ever been released. In my past life as a label manager, I worked with acts like Thou and Uniform and the Body, bands whose music blurred the border between metal and its various hinterlands. That’s a part of me, too, and I hope it will be part of this column.

But enough preamble: Since this is a reset for the Stereogum metal column, it feels like a good moment to take stock of where metal is as we enter 2025. My fellow metalheads, the state of our metal is strong — with reservations. I won’t belabor the points made by Eli Enis in his seminal essay for this website, “Metal’s Stadium Class Is Less Metal Than Ever,” but the mainstream does indeed often feel like a wasteland, at least beyond the elder statesmen in Maiden, Priest, Metallica, and the like. (Bands also aren’t breaking through the way they once did: The newest metal-adjacent album on the Billboard 200 right now is Linkin Park’s Meteora, from 2003.) As bad as the early 2000s felt for metal at the time, we’ve backslid since then. Slipknot and System Of A Down became truly massive acts amid rock radio’s post-9/11 rallying around meatheaded, conservative butt rock. It’s hard to imagine that happening today.

Still, it’s not worth writing off metal’s mainstream potential entirely. Like any genre that hopes to survive as more than a museum, metal demands a constantly replenishing source of fresh blood. I don’t know how many kids are making the journey from Bad Omens and Beartooth to Black Sabbath, but the lineups of rock festivals like Sonic Temple here in my hometown of Columbus are at least offering them a fighting chance. This year, real-deal extreme metal is nearly as well represented on the lineup as the radio-friendly, lowest-common-denominator shit. Come for I Prevail, leave repping Acid Bath? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

The place where metal seems to be making its most significant inroads with younger listeners, at least right now, is at the nexus of old-school death metal and hardcore. Whenever I go see a band like Sanguisugabogg or 200 Stab Wounds, I’m comfortably 15 years older than the average mosher there. That makes sense — hardcore is huge with kids today primarily because of its level of DIY accessibility and its raw, in-the-flesh physicality. Death metal, especially the more groove-oriented, less technicality-concerned styles, can offer a similar experience. Nobody who’s survived a Torture pit would argue otherwise. (I’m on the record as not getting Torture at all, but I probably have to chalk that one up to getting old.) In those rooms, I can feel the new lifeblood being injected into the scene. Gently headbanging to an old-man thrash band is one of life’s great pleasures, but it doesn’t feel like it’s moving anything forward. Watching a bunch of teenagers lose their goddamn minds to a chugging, drop-A riff does.

More common in metal in 2025 is the hyper-focused micro-scene, usually proliferating online rather than in physical space. Musicians in these scenes aren’t necessarily aiming for crossover success; they’re feeding a demand for a specific thing and building community through it. The raw black metal/dungeon synth scene is a good example. (Some acts blend the two styles; others play one or the other but aesthetically align themselves with the shared subculture.) There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of artists in that world who have popped up since the beginning of the pandemic, most of whom release their music on limited tape runs of as few as 25 copies. It’s almost impossible to be a completist of that style, but there are plenty of people who get obsessed and dive deep. I tend to skim the surface, looking for the standouts. But you can dive as deep as you want into any number of these micro-scenes. I listen to more traditional heavy metal bands with Conan the Barbarian-looking dudes on their album covers than I probably should. Maybe you really love technical brutal slam. To each their own.

If metal once looked like a tribe, with long-haired, black-shirted high schoolers trading acknowledging nods across the cafeteria, it’s a bit more complicated now. Metal’s increasingly specific subgenres have atomized the scene. A death metal fan might want nothing to do with black metal; my beloved power metal remains exceptionally niche in the United States. As a metalhead of what I’d like to think is discerning taste, it’s more likely than not that when a random person recommends me a band, I’m going to think they suck. There are simply too many bands, and too few of them that we all agree on. It was once pretty easy to scream “SLAAAAYER!” in a heavy metal parking lot and get a reciprocal reply. What do you think would happen if I screamed “LAMP OF MURMUUUUUUR”?

There’s also very little material solidarity among metalheads, despite exhortations from the likes of Bruce Dickinson, who gives a little unity speech at Maiden shows before launching into “Blood Brothers.” How can you be blood brothers, an LGBTQ metalhead might ask, with someone who wants you dead? It’s a fair question without a good answer. Metal didn’t arise out of a sense of political purpose the way punk and hardcore did, so its fans are more ideologically heterogenous. When I go to a metal show – especially one here in Ohio, and especially one for an older band – I’m in a room with more Republicans than at any other moment in my social life. Sometimes that feels cool, a throwback to a time when people across the political spectrum coexisted in mottled affinity groups. Other times, Blackie Lawless unfurls Trump banners during a W.A.S.P. concert, and it takes the trans frontwoman of the great band Sonja to blow the whistle on it.

Existing as a metalhead within the extremely-online leftist sphere, as I try to do, can also be difficult. There’s an arcane rulebook governing which bands and labels are “sketchy,” and you might be shocked to learn that it’s not just the ones that employ Nazis. Play six-degrees-of-shithead too loosely and you’ll end up on the wrong side of someone’s indignant tweet. After a week, nobody remembers what it was about. It’s an exhausting cycle that’s frequently left me thinking of a band I liked in 2015 and asking myself, “Wait, were they canceled?” The paper trail usually goes cold. I try to save my energy for the true pieces of shit that litter the scene, of which there are still too many. The guy who used to be in a band with the guy whose former label rep reposted a right-wing podcast isn’t on my mind too much.

Outside of the scattered regional scenes, online communities, and political cohorts that exist, artistic individualism is flourishing in metal. A lot of my favorite artists today are the ones who take advantage of the relative ease of recording and the democratization of distribution models to release a ridiculous amount of music. Now is the time of the true original, the epoch of the iconoclast. Ryan Clackner from Knoxville, TN and Ayloss from Athens, Greece have dozens of distinct musical personae between them; I’ve interviewed both men and discovered singular working processes that you simply can’t learn by hanging out at the metal bar. Erin Dawson, who records as Genital Shame, has built a small but mighty discography of deconstructionist black metal that feels like it’s giving birth to its own musical tradition—”trans woman black metal,” she calls it, with a wink but not totally in jest. I couldn’t tell you what Adam Kalmbach is doing on most of the albums he releases under the Jute Gyte name, but I find them all fascinating.

Take the list of new tracks below as evidence that metal is thriving away from the glare of mainstream attention. Five of the 10 songs were self-released by the artist, and only three of the bands exist within what I would call a traditional “scene.” (Two of those three are from Sweden, which publicly funds community music programs — for now, anyway.) There’s less institutional support for metal than ever, and at least anecdotally, normal people’s parents don’t even know it’s still being made. But metalheads have had decades of practice thickening their skin against slings and arrows. So what if there’s no remunerative or reputational incentive to make this music? Metal finds a way.

TEN NAILS THROUGH THE NECK

JOURNEY TO THE WORLD BEYOND

Hegseth sounds like a pretty good Scandinavian black metal band ruined by a quick google of their thunder bolt iconography

— Amy Ash (@lolennui.bsky.social) January 23, 2025 at 2:57 PM