Obviously this site has become the central hub for the metal music community, but how many users on here also actively contribute to RYM? I find that site very useful for the most part, especially since there are profiles for many bands that are deemed unacceptable but borderline from this site. The largest issue I have with that site is how genres are added. I have tried and failed to add several important genres on that site, so I was hoping there was some community of users here that put the same/similar amount of energy into both sites. Other than that, what other genres do you guys think would be beneficial to add on RYM that is either on the Archives or is too specific for the genre fields here?

For those unfamiliar, here is how the RYM metal genre tree is structured:
https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/metal/

I've been using RYM for a long time, and probably use it quite a bit more than M-A because it's much more all-encompassing. They conceive of metal quite differently than M-A does, less riff-centric, and with a system of user voting rather than strict moderator approval. This makes things even more ambiguous, though perhaps closer to how the average music enthusiast uses terms in the "real world". The user base seems to have grown weary of adding metal subgenres in recent years, so it's hard to add additional ones. USPM wasn't listed until just a year or two ago, for example. I didn't even discover the genre queue until just last year, but I've tried to follow it a bit more since then.

A few wishlist genres I'd love to see are melodic death doom metal, Swedish death metal, atmospheric doom metal, progressive death metal (maybe also black), doomgaze, atmospheric rock, and dream and/or doom folk. Prog death was already on there at one point and then removed, a mistake in my estimation. Maybe also subdividing the various strands of melodic death metal as well, though I'm less sure of how exactly to split them up with proper nomenclature.

I've just heard about this site from this post, and I'm thinking about using that place more often. The hierarchy of subgenres can be improved though. For starters, is USPM really a different branch from EUPM? Also, shouldn't sludge metal be under the doom metal category, and viking metal be under black/pagan metal? I'm glad they have a term for electronic metal (the trance metal category), and I'm definitely glad they did not include glam metal, which, if anything, is practically more of a subgenre of hard rock than heavy metal.

I find USPM (Omen, Manila Road, etc) to be fairly distinct from Euro PM (the former being “darker” to my ears).

While the idea of having your music rated to get rankings and a general idea of how your music collection looks like is great, the subgenres make zero sense (for example, post metal and atmospheric sludge being different genres is bonkers) and the community is just god awful. I used to be a member but decided to delete my account a while ago. It's also worth noting the place is heavily understaffed so edits can take literal ages and there's usually zero moderation for shitty reviews and trolling in the comments section.

Also the way people can vote for genre tags usually makes the tags for each album more complex than they should and not realistic. Prog Rock? No this is Avant-Prog, Jazz-Rock, Brutal Prog, Math Rock, Art Rock, Noise Rock, Progressive Rock, Rio, Experimental Rock, Avantgarde Rock and Bossa nova. It's just a huge mess.

They have a parent/child hierarchy to establish lineage. It's a hybrid of doom and hardcore, but for some bands the doom metal facet is more of a secondary influence than a primary one, like Neurosis and Godflesh, for example. If sludge were under doom then that would indicate that all sludge is strongly doom at its core, which isn't always the case.



Similar deal I think, some bands are more closely related to folk metal, thrash, prog metal, etc. If it were under black then the bands with very limited black metal influence would show up on the black metal charts.



There are obviously a lot of similarities and overlap, but there's plenty of post-metal that isn't sludgy, Agalloch, Alcest, and Deafheaven for example.



Sometimes it does get excessive, but overall I really appreciate the nuance. Prog rock is a huge genre with wildly differing versions of it with relatively little in common, so I like that there can be multiple primaries and secondary genres to distinguish albums. Otherwise, Camel, The Mars Volta, and black midi would be considered the same sound, which they clearly aren't. If you want to filter out some of the nuance, you can just ignore the secondary tags and look at the up/down vote ratios on each primary tag to see which is dominant and which are more contested. But some albums are just too variegated to neatly fit into a single box, so I enjoy the granularity.

Most of those tags have progressive rock as a master genre. I don't see the issue, the album will still pop up if you do a search of prog rock.

It's a useful website, but not without issues. For starters, it includes waaaaaaay too much shit that doesn't belong in metal under it, so whenever you're looking at ranking lists you have to scroll through your usual Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Korn, Converge, Deftones, and video game albums with very little to no metal at all in their composition.

I use it mainly for non-metal bands or for bands with an extensive non-metal discography with one or a few metal albums, like King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard, or Ulver. The reasoning behind this is that bands like KGatLW, for instance, will have much more reviews for albums like Infest the Rat's Nest then other records, because it's their "only" metal album. So if I want to explore their discography, I'll look at the ratings on RYM too.

Still, it's a very useful website, even for metal. Whenever I feel like exploring, especially older records of genres I might know a little less about, or if I want a perspective that is different from MA's dominant perspective, I go to RYM. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that MA has a dominant narrative, I myself am contributing to it, but it's nice to see what people outside of the community think.

You can select filters to get rid of categories you don't consider metal enough, like alternative metal.

I know, but the more filters you apply, the more you end up messing with the websites algorithms, you know those that calculate that an album with more ratings but with a lower average rating will land higher then an album with less ratings but with a better average, and this usually leads to a bunch of nazi shit black metal ending up in higher spots because nazis are the only ones showing up to vote for this shit, so they get higher ratings.

I like the website, really, but it isn't without flaws, is what I'm saying.

Messing with the algorithms to find more of what I want and less of what I don't is kind of the whole point of them to me. I'd just start ignoring or filtering those out too. Every site has its pros and cons, so we just have to accept that the RYM community has a more expansive concept of metal than this site does.

I copied all these tags from a single album. A single album can't be all those genres.

USPM is also a tad thrashier - I'm thinking the '80's output from bands like Helstar, Vicious Rumors and the aforementioned Omen and Manilla Road. It's really different from most Euro PM.

Having these distinctions is useful for a site like RYM even though it frequently descends into overkill and exaggeration.

Yeah, I don't actually care all that much about them including borderline stuff. Like you said, it can be filtered out. I still don't get how anyone listening to Rage Against the Machine would ever think they are a metal band, but whatever. The filters are useful, yes. But it's hard to filter out the NSBM stuff though.

RATM never really properly fit anywhere, but they're just heavier and more aggressive than your average rap-rock band. Riffier too, though with more of a 70s feel, just juiced up. But they had a lot of overlap culturally with nu and alt-metal, so they just had more in common with those scenes than with normal alternative rock. They fit better on a tour with System of a Down and Helmet than one with R.E.M. and the Pixies.

Awesome website actually. Really easy to write short reviews and also very informative. More users oriented rather than critics (like allmusic.com f.e.)

I've been using RYM for about 2 years now and I've really enjoyed it. I use it to catalog what I'm listening to over time and I put reviews up semi-frequently. I really like that they're okay with short reviews. It suits my writing style better and a lot of my shorter reviews on MA get rejected for not being long enough. I used to either re-write them from scratch or add some filler when that happens but now I just don't bother and stick them on RYM instead. I will say though that the community is full of fucking idiots so I never interact with anyone if I can help it. It's also badly understaffed and I don't bother with updates/submissions anymore because the forms they make you fill out are confusing and it takes ages for them to be approved.

Honestly, I like Metal Archives and RYM for different reasons. It's nice to switch between the two and get the best of both worlds.


USPM is veeeeery different from EUPM if you ask me. It is also far superior.

There's plenty of post metal that isn't at all sludgy and plently of atmospheric sludge that isn't, erm... "posty?" Anyway, I'd say it's fine to separate the two into different genres.

No, post metal is sludge + post rock. If it doesn't have sludge it may be a hybrid of post rock with other stuff but it isn't post metal. Neurosis, Isis and Cult of Luna are the bands that originated the term.

No you didn't. There's no such thing as avant-garde rock as a genre tag in the site.

Are you really this dumb? Do you understand hyperboles? Should I explain them to you?

Here's an example of the levels of dumbness this site can reach. Just 2 tracks:

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/singl ... l-despair/

Avant-Prog, Art Rock, Brutal Prog
Math Rock, Noise Rock, Rock in Opposition, Jazz-Rock, No Wave, Brutal Prog.

When arguing literal functions of a site, I tend to take literally points like "I copied all these tags from a single album"

That example is a tad much as a whole but those are all neighbouring subgenres and it has brutal prog twice for some reason. Honestly I'm fine with that, the three main genre tags describe different sides clearly.

There is, however, a community that are working together to try and get more metal genres on the site, since the general users often disapprove of adding new metal styles. For example, post-metal is less than 5 years old on the site because it kept failing time after time. Even a genre like southern metal is less than a year old on the site, which most music communities often recognize.

The metal community have been working to construct this list of genres to add (or modify). So what would you guys think would be the most important to include, or even those that should be disregarded? Personally, I think something like first wave black metal or pornogrind would be really useful, especially since those are two genres MA would neglect to ever use.
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/Schwilly ... subgenres/

I stopped reading at "Ultra Metal", sorry.

The smaller row of tags are secondary genres. There are some bands/albums/songs that are kind of uncategorizable and break the system. People can't decide between a bunch of similar genres, so they wind up having numerous ones. In that case to the userbase the brutal prog facet is at the tipping point of a threshold where people collectively can't decide whether it's a primary or secondary characteristic of it, so it has more yea than nay votes for both.

What is wrong with ultra metal?


Actually, I disagree. I feel the genre would work as both a parent to hard rock and heavy metal, which I would advocate for. I feel that glam metal is like a "spectrum" genre where bands that play the style are either mostly metal with some rock or mostly rock with some metal, and of course anywhere in between.

Lol @ ultra metal

It's a silly name (but then so is post-rock, djent, slowcore, deathrock, shoegaze, and countless others), and arguably too niche to be added, but it appears to me like a real historical thing. Prehispanic metal and mincecore are pretty strange too, but there seems to be a case for them as well. Quite a number of the others I would love to see added though, because they have an even stronger historical basis, or I have personal attachments to them.

I imagine "brutal prog" is just prog metal, but I also like to imagine your typical suburban prog guitarist shredding some variety of pentatonic scales with the sound of jam session-style drum fills and unfitting "Yes"-inspired bass lines playing in the background.



What.

It's metal that was recorded before Hispanic people existed, of course.

Ultra metal you mean? It exists in the sense that what it describes is indeed music that exists with elements you can distinguish. But I personnally don't think it needs to have it's own genre. It's basically first wave bm/old-school thrash revival.

Anyway, what actually made me laugh was the name. Seriously, who comes up with these?

Thanks for the explanation, I'd never heard of Ultra Metal before lol! I guess my "Metal" card has been revoked.

You guys are acting like Norsecore isn’t the most ridiculous genre name on there.

Pirate metal is also really bad.

At least that’s a common term that is always thrown around.

So is norsecore, as dumb as it may sound.

Checked out the site (RYM) several years back, and gave it a hard pass. The site's format didn't appeal to me, and as several others have already noted, the way that they try to subject sub-genre labels to a vote leads to some truly confusing and convoluted outcomes. Labeling a band's sound is not an exact science, but some of the stuff on there just positively boggled my mind. The way the forum is set up is an utter train wreck as well.

Both norsecore and pirate metal are stupid names and not actual metal genres anyway.

Norsecore is very obviously black metal.
Pirate metal is nothing more then folk metal with pirate themes. In the same vein, tons of people need to understand that viking metal is not Amon Amarth (melodic death metal), but stuff like post-BFD Bathory, later Enslaved, Demonaz, or I.



No problem!

But if you want to look these up, some folks explain them all here:
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/Schwilly ... subgenres/

Apparently I was wrong in the explanation I gave, sorry. I thought ultra metal was modern black/speed/thrash influenced by first wave bm bands, but no, apparently not. I've kept reading, and it seems that this genre, that never actually picked up was around in the 80's and 90's, so basically around the same time as thrash bands were piecing together the elements of what would become black metal. So there seems to be even less of a real justification as to why it should have it's own name.

It has many good features such as the charts, the lists and so on. I use it in a regular basis to track new releases and discover music from outside the metal realm (or those bands deemed not acceptable in MA).

However, the community are some of the most anal-retentive nerds in the Internet, and because of that, the "genre" system is a convoluted mess.

Also, the charts are biased towards music coming from the US, UK and Western Europe, and they almost always take the first spots. The customized chart system tries to do something about it, but it is not quite enough since albums from outside that sphere tend to have less votes.

Honestly a different version of this applies to this very site.



Isn't this pretty much an issue for any primarily English website on the internet though? People pay most attention to what is near them or most similar to them.

I have been lurking these forums for a very long time, but THIS right here has brought me out of the shadows. That reply fucking killed me, and deserves a little recognition.