Informal Reader Poll: What Will Your Scene Look Like When It Comes Back?

If there’s anything you learn while writing about music, it’s that culture is cyclical, and music moves with it. We like to think that every era of music stands alone as a beautiful portrait of a time and place — but at some point, without question, that shit is going to get rehashed. Out of nowhere, the kids of today, who for years have been laughing at the fashion and cultural tropes of your favorite subculture, are going to start dressing like a fashionable reimagining of how you and your friends used to look. They’ll release music that’s apparently the return of your favorite genre even though it sounds nothing like the albums you loved. And they’ll tell you, straight-faced, without irony or humor, that they’ve always loved this stuff.

This has been especially true with metal. Every time a new subgenre of metal comes out, everyone either gets on board with it or immediately demonizes it as stupid, toxic, and not as good as what came before it…for a time. Then, all of a sudden, everyone loves it. Turns out they always loved it! And now the bands you either adored and got ripped on for, or loathed and decried, are playing your favorite festivals. Suddenly Limp Bizkit is headlining Wacken. It all comes back around.

The nu-metal revival drove this home especially hard. When thrash came back in the mid-to-late 2000s, it almost felt wholesome — people might have mocked the era’s tight jeans, but no one hated thrash. But people fucking despised nu-metal in its heyday, declaring it the subgenre that metal had to claw its way back from. Everyone was glad it was dead, and said so, over and over. And then Vein and Code Orange showed up, and all these fucking journalists’ Twitter accounts were full of how much they “secretly loved” Sevendust and Powerman 5000. It made us think: if nu-metal can come back, what else could come back? Will there be a scenecore revival? A hipster black metal rennaisance?

So, we want you to tell us: what will your scene look like when it comes back? How do you think the music and culture you love will look when, in five, ten, or even 20 years, a bunch of kids start bringing it back to life? How will the next generation sound? What will they wear? Which parts of this scene will they fetishize, and which important aspects of it will they forget?

Let us know in the comments. No wrong answers, just curious.