Metal Music Lounge - No more subgenres (on metal-archives.com)

No more sub-genre tags, descriptors, influences. No more "technical something/other metal with non-metal fusion influences."

"Metal"

Lemmy, the God himself, called Motörhead a rock 'n' roll band. They're also considered pioneers of speed metal, a precursor to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and of course a hard rock/rock 'n' roll band. Still, all this focus on the genre detracts from what they really were: badass.

Tom G. Warrior once described Celtic Frost as "a rock and roll band, on the heavier side." The band's genre is nearly impossible to pin down, often labeled as a speed/black/thrash metal band in their earlier form when they were freshly evolved from Hellhammer, a black/death/thrash metal band on their debut, creators of avant-garde metal mixed with new wave influence on Into the Pandemonium, glam rock/metal on the poorly received Cold Lake, gothic/doom metal on Vanity/Nemesis, and finally some sort of unholy conjuration which melded black/death/gothic/doom and more on Monotheist. We don't want to waste any more time trying to pin down such complex genre decisions - that's best left to folks who have too much time because they can't take off their serious faces long enough to enjoy Frost's cover of Wall of Voodoo's Mexican Radio.

Black Sabbath have been regarded as the progenitors of heavy metal since long before this encyclopaedia existed. They are also hailed as the originators of doom metal, a sub-genre which frequently makes reference to being derived from Tony Iommi's riffs. Their music touches on other genres at times, too, from the blues rock of the B-side of their self-titled album (covers of blues rock bands Crow and The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation) to progressive rock on Volume 4 (Iommi was also briefly in prog rock pioneers Jethro Tull) and an unfortunate crossover with rap on 1995's Forbidden album. It is hard to capture this nuance, but Black Sabbath are *the* metal band.

Another hotly-contested genre listing is that of black metal and viking metal pioneers Bathory. Many contemporary sources considered the band's early music to be thrash metal, and the mid-90s albums certainly were. There's even a song on Destroyer of Worlds, "Sudden Death," which is an ode to playoff hockey and sounds like Pantera, the groove metal pioneers who also recorded the Dallas Stars fight song.

These are, of course, four of the finest bands in the world, and the real pain of running the site is not in the limited number of good bands, but in handling the frequent requests to re-evaluate the genres of the majority of the 157,000 bands on the site, most of which are not very good or worth our time. This is almost as bad as people telling us that group Between the Buried and Me are a "progressive metal" band every time we make a post on Facebook. They're not.

From this day forward, we're calling metal bands what they are - "metal" - and nothing more. No more technicalities on technical x metal. No more post-metal, post-rock or post-hardcore influences, and certainly not post-malone, which we're told is a subgenre of SoundCloud rap which Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne dabbled with on his 2020 album Ordinary Man.