Looking Back at the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, 10 Years Later
Metal Injection’s Drew Zalucky has written a fantastic editorial entitled “Reflecting on the New Wave of American Heavy Metal,” now that the movement is basically over. I recommend you go and read every single word of it.
The biggest criticism I hear lofted at bands included in the NWOAHM grouping — Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall, Lamb of God, etc — is that they’re too mainstream, too melodic, their vocals too cheesy. Listen, I get it, by today’s standards they are.
But you have to understand how fucking dire shit was before those bands came around. We had Pantera and that was basically it. I stopped listening to metal almost completely between 1997 and 2003 or so; nu-metal came along and I completely threw in the towel. It’s hard to explain to anyone that didn’t live through it how exciting it was in 2004 when real metal — featuring talented players that were actually good at their instruments — became cool again. We take it for granted now because it’s so easy to discover and spread music on the Internet, but before 2004 or so it was basically impossible to discover underground, more extreme metal — and everything that was going on across the pond in Scandinavia — unless you knew someone who was already plugged into it.
Then those bands came along and smashed the doors wide open, paving the way for more extreme metal to be spread to the masses in the decade to come. It also created an ecosystem under which smaller bands could grow and thrive. It was a really fucking important moment in the history of heavy metal.
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