Heavy Metal Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas in 2020
If you’re looking for gift ideas for your metal boo for your upcoming wedding anniversary, there are plenty of easy wins sure to make sure your partner comes away happy.
Anything connected to their favorite band is a surefire hit, but we’re here to suggest a few other items you may not have thought of and some you likely have. Upgraded electronics to better enjoy the music they love, an original or reissued vinyl pressing of a favorite album, concert tickets (once live shows inevitably return), band t-shirts and other merchandise are just a few good gift ideas, for any occasion, really.
Here are a few of our picks.
Metal Festivals
What better way to celebrate an anniversary than partying with like-minded people who have yet to become your best friends? Choose from the myriad metal festivals around the globe based on the band lineup, location, overall ethos and whether you want to support up and coming groups as well as the big names.
With 2020 seeing most events cancelled or postponed, an anniversary gift of tickets to an event next year is perfect for those keen to travel and enjoy the camaraderie of festivals and music, with a number of major festivals already having announced 2021 dates and lineups.
The heavy metal calendar starts at Easter with the Dark Easter Metal Meeting in Munich, Germany. This is followed by Roadburn, in Tilburg, the Netherlands, the Graspop Metal Meeting in Dessel, Belgium in June, Wacken Open Air in Germany in July, the Rockstadt Extreme Fest on the first weekend in August in Rasnov, Romania and Brutal Assault, happening in Jaromer, Czech Republic in August as well. As readers of this site know well, those are just a few of the many, many metal festivals the world over! You can even gift some rare winter sun to your loved one (and yourself) with tickets to Monterey for the Mexico Metal Fest in November.
Traditional gifts
The traditional anniversary gift list of materials for each year ranges from paper in the first year, representing the symbolic fragility of a new relationship, to the tough diamond anniversary of the 60th year. There are many anniversaries represented by metals, including the silver and gold anniversaries that are well known for marking the 25th and 50th years of marriage respectively, but the 11th anniversary gift is also marked with metal, this time steel. Steel is perfect for those who are allergic to other metals or simply find them tacky, so a watch or bracelet made of steel is a safe gift for everyone… and, of course, extremely metal.
Gold
The aforementioned gold, which comes in various forms, is the perfect gift for a 50th wedding anniversary if any of you metalheads out there have made it that far into your marriage from the genre’s very earliest days. Pure gold is 24 karats and is a very precious gift. This works well on many home décor items, but pure gold is too soft to be used to make jewelry until it is alloyed with other metals like copper and silver to make it stronger, giving it a karat level of between 10k and 18K.
Original vinyl pressings
With first press vinyl records from back in the day, the original master tapes were used to cut the wax with results that sound as good now as they did decades ago. However, if a company sources their vinyl pressings from a CD, the results don’t sound nearly as good, and can even be worse than a CD. If you are struggling to track down an original copy of a favorite record, a reissue sourced from a CD may be your only option, which may be acceptable if you’re only interested in it as a piece of memorabilia. But if it’s sound quality you’re after, vinyl sourced from CD masters simply won’t do.
If you can find an original Megaforce pressing of Metallica’s Kill ’em All for your partner you can almost guarantee they will be loyal to you for life. Same goes for original pressings of any of the ’80s records released by the Big Four, really. Good luck tracking these down online, though, especially at affordable prices.
Upgraded headphones for vinyl
Good headphones can elevate the sound quality of metal to the next level… especially if you want to listen to music without disturbing the neighbors or once your family is asleep. If your partner listens to music on a turntable, instead of headphones that plug directly into the turntable, gift a headphone amplifier, a special device for headphone listening that makes the music sound even better. Otherwise, a Bluetooth turntable with good wireless Bluetooth capable headphones can be a solid option, too.
Be sure to gift full-size, over-the-ear headphones rather than in-ear buds. Bigger headphones with larger drivers will give a richer sound that has a deeper, punchier bass. Choose wired analogue headphones without noise cancellation for the best sounds, as other options can reduce sonic quality.
We hope that helps. Feel free to apply our advice to birthdays, half birthdays, graduations, work anniversaries or anything, really — just keep cranking it loud.
