I expect this is an unpopular opinion: The overwhelming majority of metal is religious. It expresses and espouses beliefs which are Christian, Judaic, Pagan. I don't deny there are bands and songs that don't express such beliefs but I do think they are a small minority.

When you phrase it this vaguely it's definitely gonna be unpopular. A lot of metal lyrics cover things that are metaphysical or spiritual for sure, but the amount of bands who are actively trying to sell doctrine in the usual "religious music" sense is quite low. I feel like a lot of metalheads still hold metaphysical beliefs firmly rooted in the naive realism of the new atheist movement, where anything even remotely related to typical religious allegory is seen as straight up religious. I remember back when DsO had just released Si Monvmentvm there were plenty of bonehead metalheads who would point to their use of scripture to accuse them of being Christian, lol. I guess that's still around.

I think the less controversial take would be to say that the overwhelming majority of metal is philosophical. There's a lyrical tendency to deal with large scale conceptualism, where allegory is a great tool to drive home a point. Add to it metal's rebellious infatuation with blasphemy and it's quite easy to see how it's ended up that way.

Metal as a whole genre isn't really about anything in particular.

It's a speculative hypothesis more than anything, and I don't believe it's true (especially because of the "overwhelming" quantifier; frankly, it makes it seem a bit ridiculous).

It also bears mentioning that allegedly religious pagan lyrics needn't be actually religious at all.

This. I've seen just about every topic you can imagine done in metal, and it's probably one of the most diverse musical genres topic-wise.

Also, I just realized that this is now my 2,000th post on this forum lol

If anything it's a lot less political or pointed as a full genre than some others can get... certain bands have ideologies and points, but a lot of metal is just like 'fuck it, we like the way this all sounds together.'

Okay. Perhaps "religious" was the wrong word to use but I couldn't find a better one. Not spiritual. I definitely don't think it's necessary to sell doctrine to be religious. Not everyone who's religious goes around proselytizing.

Maybe an definition followed by some exemplars would help.

religious. adjective:
1: devoted to God or to the powers or forces believed to govern life
2: of or relating to religion: religious beliefs
3: very devoted and faithful: performed his duties with religious regularity

Now for examples let's start with one of the very first metal songs, whose lyrics are pretty similar to thousands of other metal tunes:

1. Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Big black shape with eyes of fire
Telling people their desire
Satan's sitting there, he's smiling
Watch those flames get higher and higher
Oh no, no, please God help me!

Here we've got God and Satan - one, if not two deities. I don't think I need to say more, it pretty clearly nails the first definition. Taken alone the lyrics might even be mistaken for satire but the music seems unmistakably calculated to elicit fear, and the reactions of listeners on songmeanings.com show that fear is the reaction from most on hearing the song.

2. Esoteric - Culmination

Tis nothing if not a cruel world,
Again we endure
A sound that has become all too familiar,
As the music plays, the curtains draw

A "cruel world" is surely a belief in powers or forces that govern life, and music that never lets up in its despondency, anguish and despair cannot really be described as anything other than devoted to those powers and forces.

3. Manowar - Gloves of Metal

Hear the pounding army of the night
The call of metal summons us tonight.
And gather we on this site
To behold the power and the might.
We wear leather, we wear spikes, we rule the night.

Off with the lights, hear the screams
See the banging heads awaken to their dreams.
The sound of metal so loud it cracks the beams
Played by warriors called the Metal Kings.

This one describes a way of life, a higher calling, and fits within the third definition (which doesn't refer to any deity or higher power). The lyrics talk about the band members and the group/congregation they belong to how strong their faith is in "metal". It is akin to worship and can be compared with Christian worship music in the zealousness of the very strongly worded language, and the same could be said about the music which is designed to be sung along to and shared with the congregation.

You might be right, especially since anti-religion and politics become many peoples' religion. At least it is quite common in the stuff I listen to.

In the context of music genres "religious" definitely seems to be reserved for the proselytizing bunch. I just think you've set the bar too low, especially with that Sabbath example. It seems pretty obvious to me that they're using concepts like god and Satan as storytelling tools, not objects of worship. And your second example just sounds like your standard existentialist musings, nothing religious about it. But if your point is that metal as a fandom is a very zealous one, I agree. There's an elevation of concepts like consistency and "trueness", to a point where it's comparable with what you'd find in die-hard religious communities. But it's not unique to religion. Every fandom has its fair share of loyalists, even if metal might have slightly more as far as music genres go.

I see enough people talking about it that I guess this qualifies... I'm highly against speeding up albums or rearranging the tracklist or any of that stuff. I just want to hear what was originally intended. Messing with that is just valueless to me.

This 100%!

What next, people going into art galleries and colouring bits of paintings in because they think it "Looks better"?

If you think you know better, go form your own band.

I actually do this sort of thing all the time but I never do it with the intention of "replacing" the original. Like, the original is always there, I neither can nor want to erase that original piece of art. But hey, sometimes it's fun to tinker with shit and see what cool stuff you can do with it, and maybe you can create a more enjoyable experience for yourself. It's a cool "what if" scenario to try to make Wintersun's debut not awful or maybe you think Nightfall in Middle-Earth flows better without all the interludes or cutting and rearranging the last three Metallica albums into one hypothetical good one, ya know?

I get where y'all're coming from but I think there's a world of difference between me making Bastard Cuts for my own amusement and Exigence from a decade ago insisting that Redeemer of Souls was AOTY if you just cut five songs off of it and rearranged the order and then acted like that simply *was* how the album was always intended and everybody else was listening incorrectly. And frankly, the logical endpoint of this Original Vision Purity leads to certifiably goofy opinions like "skipping tracks or not finishing albums in one sitting is wrong". If that's how you feel then I'm sorry man go get an ice cream cone or something and learn to enjoy things.

Don't know what else to say other than none of that really appeals to me, tinkering and whatnot. NIME just doesn't work for me because of the interludes - I'd rather just go play one of their other albums.

And yeah sure it'd be weird to get hung up on people not finishing an album or skipping things. I don't find myself skipping stuff often and the only reason I don't finish an album is due to time constraints primarily, though. And people who say they never listen to full albums at all, well that's a very different thing than I do too.

I rarely skip songs but most interludes, intros and outros are just dumb and pointless to me. I've gotten to the point where I use Audacity to edit most of them out of songs to play in my car so I don't have to listen to some 3 minute ambient nonsense at the start and and of an album I otherwise enjoy. I will leave the MP3s on my PC as they originally were but I still almost always skip the parts of songs I don't like or an intro/outro/interlude that bores me.

Ok how about Opeth is literally the most perfect dichotomy of yeah fuck yeah dude mixed with I'm gonna kick this guy in the fucking nuts if he ever does that again it's like an exact science to akerfeldt to either be pretty rad or extremely fucking lame he's a genuis I think

His buddy Steven Wilson might be the same actually

The controversy with the interludes on Nightfall in Middle-Earth baffles me. Why are you guys so hung up on stuff that (with the exception of the opening "War of Wrath") is not even a minute long? You guys are acting like the album is 70% interludes and only 30% music. Not counting the bonus track "Harvest of Sorrow", the album is 66 minutes long with 59 of those minutes being the songs. Are those collective 7 minutes of interludes really that rage-inducing that you have to go through the effort of deleting them in a music editing software when it's just easier to say "eh, I'll just let 'em play"? Besides, some interludes like "The Minstrel" or "Battle of Sudden Flame" are nice bite-sized bits of melodies. Besides, even if the album was 70% interludes, they're good interludes. I'd rather listen to an album that's mostly good interludes than an album with no interludes but bad songs.

But anyways, I do agree about listening to an album in the intended order that it's presented in. Every now and then when I don't want to listen to an album all the way through but still want to listen to something, I put on playlists, but I'm pretty adamant about listening to how it's presented by the artist or label. To me, it's like watching a movie with the scenes shuffled around.

Roy Khan's best vocal performances are with Conception, not Kamelot.

The dichotomy being metal parts and acoustic parts? It's an established thing about Opeth, their whole early identity. Him and Steven Wilson are prog dudes. Duh. What is this cringe mush you're talking

The version of Bling Guardian's Nightfall without the interludes is way better. And I say this as a big Necros Christos fan.

Bling Guardian

I think when you've been listening to metal for such a long time it's easy to forget how certain "standard" viewpoints in the genre are actually quite unusual.

Yes, the belief that the world is cruel, unforgiving and filled with hate and death is extremely common in metal. But it's not one that is shared in the general population, or by science. It's not an atheistic point of view - which would be that the world is neither "cruel" nor loving and filled with peace and love.

It's a very one-sided view. So yes, dedicating an entire album or career to the cruelty of the world, musically and lyrically, is something I see as devotional.

That's not just representative of doom metal. Death metal, black metal and other genres are devoted to other "dark" aspects, all equally one-sided.

Lyrically, I think most existentialists would be in large part quite hostile to the ouvre of a band like Esoteric (and many other doom artists, not to mention black metal). They'd probably see such a single-pointed vision as stifling not encouraging inquiry into the nature of existence.

I mean it's not that huge of a deal for me with Nightfall, I just like many of their albums with no interludes more and think they flow better. Virgin Steele's Atreus albums do that interlude stuff way better for me.

make an effort wow,maybe you read a book and skip the chapters?(or you are some guys that play Dark Souls with a speed run?lost all the beauty of the game?)
Some albums must be heard in their entirety with active listening.

Of NIME I already expressed my opinion pages ago…

We are human,let’s work our brain….

But some aging bands sound likey the still have a bit of energy if you speed them up a tad. But while I'd give that a listen once as a novelty its just not going to get into rotation.

That's still not what religious means. And I mean, you're working backwards here. You have a conclusion you want to get to, so you twist the definitions of words for things to line-up as you want them to. Having certain points of view on life, the world, morality, what's good and what's bad, humanity (including human nature) is not religious. It's much more philosophical then it is religious. Someone else already pointed this out. They were right.

They're about equal for me. I think I like Nightfall... slightly more than Atreus Act I, but the quality is not that much of a difference. I just get annoyed by the constant INTERLUDE BAD lazy criticism that I see toward Nightfall..., hence the rant.

I like Conception more than Kamelot but I'm not sure. When he was younger, on the first two Conception more than the others, I found his vocals a bit "breathy" at times, for lack of a better term. Still great but I think he got more powerful on IYM and Flow then moving into Kamelot.


Also, NIME wouldn't be NIME without the interludes IMO. Bling Guardian did a great job with them on that. Compared to Virgin Steele's work on Atreus, where I found it to be too much. Though that whole album was structured more around interludes and short pieces.

I was just never a Tolkien guy - their other shit is just so good that I can't deny it in spite of that. Never cared for the voice-overs and the way that specific album broke up the songs. I haven't heard it in ages though so maybe I'd think different now.

Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime also does interludes well. Seamless, on there.

Khan's best performance is The Black Halo to me - though some of the later Conception stuff is right up there too. He sounds good with the deeper, more resonant age in his voice.

My impression is that you don't necessarily need to be a Tolkein guy to enjoy Nightfall... any more than you need to be an Aeschyllus guy in order to enjoy either of the Atreus albums, but then again, we all hear things differently.

the interludes on Nightfall and the Atreus albums are all great, get some taste people

C'mon the "thus he died, Nom the Wise" is actually a bit moving

The one album where I just can’t stand the interludes is Testimony of the Ancients. I took all except two of them out using Spotify’s custom playlist maker. The album flows like shit when you listen to it with every single one of them. It ruins an album where all of the main tracks are phenomenal.

I didn't feel like that at first, but the more time I spent with the album, the less I cared for the interludes, while I loved the rest of the album more and more with every listen. They don't really add much to the album, and there's too many of them.

Edit: I actually had to look it up again to make sure, but there is actually an interlude between each track! So there's 8 actual tracks, and 8 interludes. Some of them are better then the others, but damn! I can't believe they didn't realize it was a little overkill!

Yeah I’ll bet few knows what Atreus mean…

Iliad or Aeschylus and especially Euripides' Electra…

This last tragedy must be obligatory in the school

Agreed on all counts with Testimony of the Ancients' interludes being the one sore spot of that album. Nightfall's interludes worked with the narrative structure of the album - albeit not as well as when prime Virgin Steele used them - but my beef with it is that of the actual songs, half of them are alright but a significant dip from Imaginations, and the other half are the best Blind Guardian songs ever put together ever.

How Trapped Under Ice is so poor revered?

One of best song of Metallica

Testimony of the Ancient is perfect exactly the way it is, interludes and all. Just a perfect death metal album, if there's ever been one.
I don't know where those ludicrous opinions that they ruin the album come from.

unpopular opinion but I prefer Johan Lanqvist over Messiah as Candlemass' definitive vocalist

To say that the world is cruel is just as often going to be an empirical observation as a metaphysical one. Again, there's a lot of metaphysics in metal, which is cool, but whether you interpret it as philosophical or religious is down to your mindset. Atheism says nothing about value ethics or metaphysics broadly, only that there are no deities. But like I hinted on earlier, a lot of atheists only supplant religion by giving empirical science the same worldbuilding role as a deity might otherwise play, which is equally dogmatic. From this persective, a lot of metal might seem religious, as it tends to be a lot more gnostic in its interpretations than agnostic. But fundamentally, metaphysical =/= religious.

Well, trying to place any of the first seven Iron Maiden albums in a coherent order from worst to best would be like splitting hairs. I think they're all incredible works at a minimum so whether one is slightly better than another is half down to pure chance, or whatever I'm feeling at that particular moment.

I do feel as if Killers is a slightly lesser offering than the debut record. Even if the band as a musical unit were getting tighter and more experienced, the songs, albeit still very good, don't strike me as inspired as the debut or what would come to pass with Bruce at the helm.

Been gone so long my original login goes to an email I don't use anymore.

No stranger to having my opinions unpopular. I've been thinking of some connected things recently. Also, note opinion 1.

1) Posting on MA while drunk and grumpy can be a good thing.
2) Far more black metal artists have the first two Skyclad albums in their collections than would ever admit it.

2b) The first two Skyclad albums are really the only ones you really need. (Wayward Sons of Mother Earth and Burnt Offering for the Bone Idol)

2c) A lot of people (including me) would listen to more folk metal if it sounded more like the first two Skyclad albums than . . . all the other Skyclad albums)

3) If the guys that beat up Kurt Cobain in high school had listened to country instead of metal, grunge would be considered a lot more metal tody.

3b) Speaking of which, TAD should be on the archives, they are at least if not more metal than Alice in Chains (Gods Balls and Salt Lick might be considered a bit more on the punk side of grunge, but Inhaler, 8-Way Santa, and Infrared Riding Hood are definitely metal. I've thought about submitting them myself, but I'm not going to through that much work for something that will likely be turned down on the basis of too much flannel. That's both our faults.

3c) TAD is the most underrated band, in any genre, to ever come out Washington State. (Or Idaho, if you're going to argue about that . . .)

4) Genre and sub-genre purity are going to kill metal, not save it. We already sound like a bunch of old guys telling those kids these days to get off our nice manicured metal lawn. And it's getting worse.

4a) Saying something isn't metal because of fashion is just as dumb and useless as saying something is metal because of fashion.

4b) Metal may often have a very intellectual basis at times, but dumb, jocky early 2000's metal is not non-metal. It's metal. It's just dumb.

4c) Everyone of us can probably come up with a half dozen bands that we consider absolutely metal . .. that are also just dumb.

4d) Sometimes, the mall is just closer than the cemetery.

4e) Bad metal is still metal. It's just bad. If no one was making bad metal, it would mean no one is making metal. It is a simple fact that some percentage of people who do anything will suck at it.

4f) There is some connection and always will be, between metal and the rest of what they call the schwarze Szene in Germany. I call it "negative music" because I'm a geek, and I make up my own names for things. We should never reject anything as not metal enough if it is mixed with anything schwarze Szene/negative music.

4g) Anyone who sticks to high-school levels of purity and "coolness" on the music someone likes should half to also keep their high school haircut and clothing choices.

4f) I still have my high school haircut and clothing choices.

4e) I've had both metal heads and gangsta rap fans *freak the fuck out* after listening to one my Jack off Jill CD's. Specifically "Swollen" from Sexless Demons and Scars usually gets 'em.

5) The Melvins may still eat metal and shit subgenres like some kind of mythical meta-metal beast, but they haven't had a "Melvins level of quality" album since The Bride Screamed Murder.

5a) The Melvins should have kept the two drummer lineup.

5b) The fastest way to start an argument among Melvins fans is to say that Melvins lyrics have meaning.

5c) The second fastest way to start an argument among Melvisn fans is to say Melvins lyrics don't have meaning.

5d) The first major argument I ever got into over the internet was about whether or not the Melvins' lyrics have meaning. I got into another argument about it last week.

5e) Melvins lyrics have meaning.

6) Politics cannot make some more metal or less metal.

6a) NSBM is ridiculous with this. There are bands whose riffs are picked apart with tweezers to decided if they are metal enough, but a Nazi can fart in corpsepaint for twenty minutes and it counts.

6b) "Farting in Corpsepaint for Twenty Minutes" would actually be a great name for a blackened grind album.

7) A lot of things in black metal would seem exceedingly "nerdy" in any other context.

8) Eyehategod is still the gold standard in general misanthropy.

8a) "The Age of Bootcamp" is actually one of EHG's best, not worst songs.

9) Acid King's first release, their self-titled EP is the best thing they ever put out, and the first song on it "Lead Paint" is the best song they ever put out.

10) The day we can't both recognize and laugh at the silliness that forms in any art or subculture in our own art and subculture is the day we get boring. The day we try to keep our art or subculture from changing or advancing, is the day we die. I'm not sure which is worse.