Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Rewind to the start. Jon and Criss Oliva got rolling around Tarpon Springs back in 1979, first billed as Avatar. When the brothers learned another group was already using that name, they eventually settled on Savatage, combining elements of “savage” and “Avatar.” Their 1983 debut, Sirens, holds an odd little footnote: it was among the earliest heavy metal albums recorded at Tampa’s Morrisound Studios, a room soon to become sacred ground for death metal pioneers. Primitive stuff, those opening releases. Still, the younger Oliva already played like a hurricane with fingers, a guitarist raised on the early Ozzy Osbourne records who admired Randy Rhoads and somehow folded Eric Clapton’s emotion and Eddie Van Halen’s agility into a tone all his own.

Here the tale bends toward glory, and toward sorrow too. A New Yorker named Paul O’Neill entered the picture in the mid-1980s and recognized something extraordinary in what these siblings were creating. O’Neill climbed aboard and helped rewire the entire ambition of the project. Gone went the exclusive reliance on the straight-ahead velocity of the early days. In its place arrived keyboards, choirs, orchestration, and elaborate storytelling. Hall of the Mountain King in 1987 flexed the muscle. Gutter Ballet, two years later, unveiled the art, piano and heartbreak colliding with riffs. After that landed Streets, a full-blown rock opera from 1991 tracing a troubled musician struggling to escape his past, exactly the kind of swing for the fences that most record labels would hesitate to fund.

So why did none of this ambition translate into stadiums and platinum plaques?

One culprit was a record industry that never seemed to know how to market the treasure in its hands. Atlantic pushed the group toward a glossier, more commercially accessible direction on 1986’s Fight for the Rock, a detour widely regarded as a misfire that baffled longtime followers without attracting enough new ones. Rock radio presented another obstacle. Savatage could deliver a powerful melody, but programmers often seemed more comfortable with music that fit neatly into an established format. Grunge then rolled in and damaged traditional metal’s commercial footing just as these Floridians were reaching another artistic peak. Pile on a sound too operatic for some metal purists yet too crushing for mainstream pop audiences, and a devoted cult following becomes the ceiling rather than a coronation.

Cruelest of all arrived on October 17, 1993. Criss and his wife Dawn were traveling along Highway 301 toward a livestock festival near Zephyrhills in the early morning hours. A drunk driver with seven previous DUI convictions and a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit crossed into their path and struck their car head-on. Criss died at the scene, just 30 years old. Dawn survived with severe injuries. The driver also survived, suffering multiple fractures and other injuries. Convicted in connection with the fatal collision, he ultimately served approximately 18 months in prison. The punishment seemed painfully small beside the life that had been taken and the devastation left behind.

Timing twisted the knife deeper. Edge of Thorns had surfaced only months prior, delivering the group’s first U.S. rock-radio hit and a fresh voice in Zak Stevens, recruited after Jon Oliva stepped away from lead vocal duties amid personal exhaustion and a desire to pursue other creative projects. Jon continued writing and working with the band, but Criss remained its unmistakable guitar voice. Real momentum, at last. Then it vanished in a heartbeat. When bassist Johnny Lee Middleton later entered the studio and spotted Criss’s signature white guitar standing in the corner, the grief became unbearable. Middleton turned around and walked out, unable to face recording without his friend. He would not play on the next studio album, although he eventually returned to the band.

What unfolded next is the stretch that raises goosebumps. Grief refused to bury the enterprise. Instead, loss poured straight into the work. Jon Oliva and Paul O’Neill chose to continue Savatage as a tribute to Criss, believing that keeping the music alive was the proper way to honor his memory. The albums that followed rank among the most emotionally charged recordings in the group’s catalog. Handful of Rain, from 1994, became almost a Jon Oliva solo project in disguise, with Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick stepping into the difficult lead guitar position. Dead Winter Dead followed in 1995, a concept album set against the Bosnian War. The arrangements grew even more ambitious, with haunting melodies, orchestral passages, and the kind of dramatic storytelling that had become the band’s calling card.

Tucked away on that record sat an instrumental that quietly rewrote the future. “Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)” welded familiar Christmas melodies to grinding guitars and sweeping strings, and the reaction surprised nearly everybody involved. Radio stations that might otherwise have overlooked Savatage began embracing the recording, particularly during the holiday season. Paul O’Neill recognized an opportunity to expand an idea he had been developing for years. Working with Jon Oliva, keyboardist Robert Kinkel, guitarist Al Pitrelli, and other musicians, the producer helped launch Trans-Siberian Orchestra in 1996. You can guess the rest. Those elaborate holiday spectacles eventually packed arenas across America, sold millions of albums, and became a December tradition that commercially dwarfed Savatage many times over.

Back under the Savatage banner, the creative run reached another high point with 1997’s The Wake of Magellan, an album many devoted listeners consider among the band’s finest achievements. Now sit with the irony. A grand theatrical vision that had struggled to find a place on American metal radio became a commercial powerhouse when wrapped in Christmas storytelling. Many of the same musicians, the same appetite for orchestration, and much of the same creative imagination suddenly reached an enormous audience. Devotees of the heavier catalog have mostly made peace with the twist, yet plenty still ache wondering what an uninterrupted Savatage career, with Criss alive and shredding, might have produced. Perhaps the group would have found its own path toward greater commercial success. Perhaps the music would have grown even more adventurous. Nobody can answer that question, and the uncertainty remains part of the heartbreak.

Even now the Savatage flame refuses to die, stubborn as ever. Following Poets and Madmen in 2001 and the end of regular touring in 2002, the band entered a lengthy period of inactivity. Then came Wacken Open Air in 2015, where Savatage and Trans-Siberian Orchestra delivered an extraordinary joint performance before a massive German festival crowd. The spectacle reminded longtime followers of what these musicians could accomplish together, but a sustained touring comeback remained years away. That finally changed in 2025, when Savatage returned to European stages for its first headline performances in more than two decades. The momentum continued with the 2026 “Prelude to Madness” tour, bringing Zak Stevens back to the microphone alongside guitarists Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton, and drummer Jeff Plate. European festivals and concert venues once again heard the music that American radio had never fully embraced.

One towering absence shadows the reunion, though. Jon Oliva, now 66, has been unable to join his bandmates onstage because of serious health problems. A spinal fracture suffered in 2023 left him dealing with persistent pain, and additional diagnoses of multiple sclerosis and Ménière’s disease have complicated his recovery. Back surgery has remained a possibility, while difficulties with flying and performing have further limited his ability to travel. None of that has extinguished his creative ambitions. Oliva continues developing material for a new Savatage studio album, long discussed under the working title Curtain Call, with the possibility of including previously written material connected to his late brother. Meanwhile, another piece of that history has finally emerged. Madness Reigns From the Gutter (1990), an archival live recording featuring Criss during the Gutter Ballet era, received its long-awaited release in 2026. The band has also discussed possible American performances in 2027, although those plans remain unconfirmed. Paul O’Neill, tragically, died in 2017, leaving Jon and the surviving musicians to carry forward a remarkable musical legacy.

So the throne stayed vacant. The platinum plaques, mainstream recognition, and award-show nights largely went to other outfits, some with far less musical imagination. What the Oliva brothers created outlasts any shelf of trophies. Guitar players immersed in progressive, power, and symphonic metal still treat that catalog like scripture. A whole holiday empire grew from the musical ideas Savatage spent years developing. And somewhere beneath the triumph, the commercial disappointments, and the decades of unfinished possibilities sits the memory of a young guitarist whose life ended far too soon. Criss Oliva never got to witness the full reach of the music he helped create. His brother has spent more than three decades ensuring that those songs are never forgotten. Mainstream domination never came. For anyone who actually listened, though, the brothers from Florida wore the crown all along.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Plenty of sites will post the obituary and leave it right there. Better to do the harder thing and reckon with what the bassist actually built, because the reach of it dwarfs whatever most casual listeners assume.

In late 1979, a skinny kid from the North East joined the Newcastle outfit as a rhythm guitarist and soon found himself grabbing four strings almost by accident. When the group’s bassist disappeared shortly before a church hall gig, Lant borrowed a bass, seized the low end and never really looked back. According to Cronos’s version of the band’s early history, a roadie suggested the name Venom, and the teenager eventually rechristened himself for Cronus, the Greek Titan associated with Saturn, the planet traditionally linked to his Capricorn birth sign. Ambition on that scale, from a lad barely clear of school, tells you plenty.

What arrived next broke every rule the genre had quietly agreed to obey. Neat Records owner David Wood kept getting pestered to capture the young trio, finally relented, and out came the 1981 single In League With Satan paired with Live Like an Angel (Die Like a Devil). Crude as a brick to the skull, and proudly so. Clean technique meant nothing against the sheer malice of the attack.

Listen to those early tracks and the detail that leaps out is the four strings cranked past sanity, fuzzed into a buzzsaw snarl that hauled the whole racket on its spine. Guitar handled the riffs, sure, yet the engine room was that filthy low frequency roar, a move almost nobody had tried as the lead voice of a heavy outfit. Over the top sat a delivery that spat rather than crooned, abrasive and sneering, a blueprint later borrowed by thousands of growlers and shriekers across death metal and the wider extreme metal world.

Welcome to Hell landed in 1981 and functioned like a dare thrown in the face of the whole establishment. Here was living proof that you needed neither conservatory chops nor a fat studio budget to conjure something terrifying and alive. Teenagers hunched over cheap turntables from the California suburbs to the cold edges of Scandinavia heard it, and something just clicked. Early Metallica openly displayed its Venom fandom, with James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine among the musicians photographed wearing Venom shirts before Metallica became a global name. Across in Switzerland, Tom Gabriel Warrior took that same filth and bent it into Hellhammer, then Celtic Frost. Years later, Norwegian bands including Mayhem and Darkthrone would help carry that raw, hostile spirit into a new generation of black metal.

The year 1982 brought the album that accidentally handed a genre its name. Black Metal, the cover read, and a whole scene eventually grabbed the phrase and rode it for the next forty years. Letting two words name a movement with no such plan in mind is its own kind of legend. At War With Satan arrived in 1984 and stretched its title cut to nearly 20 minutes, a sign the trio could reach for something bigger than pure bludgeon whenever the itch struck. Possessed hit in 1985, and the occult imagery, influenced in part by Anton LaVey’s writings, hardened into pure theater.

Beyond the racket itself, Cronos helped shape the visual identity surrounding the band, contributing artwork, sleeve concepts and later logo designs that became inseparable from Venom’s image. That total vision, roar and symbol and stagecraft welded into one, handed the project a mythology most acts would murder for. Mantas and Abaddon even pulled their stage names from the pages of The Satanic Bible, rounding out a universe engineered to unsettle.

After the classic lineup fractured late in the 1980s, the singer struck out solo. A fresh unit bearing his nickname cut Dancing in the Fire in 1990 and Rock ‘n’ Roll Disease three years on, both leaning toward straight ahead rock while a serious bodybuilding habit competed for his time. Reconciliation came in 1995, when the original three reunited for Wâldrock in the Netherlands. The following year they returned for a massive appearance at Dynamo Open Air before a heaving European crowd.

Decades rolled past and the founder kept the fire lit, issuing Metal Black in 2006, Storm the Gates in 2018, and grinding through tours with younger hands Rage and Dante locked in alongside him. His closing statement reached shelves this past May, a 16th studio album named Into Oblivion, released through Noise and BMG and marking Venom’s first new studio album in eight years. Nobody spinning it realized a goodbye sat buried in the grooves. Bitter disputes had also divided the old camp, with Cronos continuing Venom, Mantas and Abaddon later reuniting for their own performances, and Tony Dolan carrying on with Venom Inc. A 2024 lawsuit involving disputed Venom merchandise designs added another layer to an already complicated history. According to Mantas, Cronos was also invited to take part in 45th anniversary performances celebrating Welcome to Hell in 2026 but declined.

Strip away the corpse paint and the courtroom drama and one fact stands clean: without that blasphemous din out of Newcastle, a huge portion of the acts packing extreme metal festival stages today would sound very different. Thrash is in Venom’s debt. Death metal, likewise. The black metal movement took its very name from their 1982 album and absorbed plenty of the ugliness, atmosphere and defiance the trio threw into the world. Conrad Lant helped lay that first stone and dared the rest of the underground to build on it.

So let’s hear from you. What are your fondest memories of this artist, the album that cracked your skull wide or the show that left your ears ringing for days after? And with the architect gone, do you believe Venom ought to carry on as a working band, or should the name be buried beside the man who helped forge it? Sound off in the comments and keep the conversation burning.

Rest easy, Cronos. The Legions hold the watch now, and that glorious, ugly roar is never going quiet. May he rest in peace.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Start with the guy gripping the guitar. Dave Mustaine got tossed from Metallica in 1983, handed a bus ticket and a grudge heavy enough to flatten a lesser talent. Resentment tends to rot a person from the inside. Here it did the reverse. That second full-length from the frontman’s fledgling crew arrived on September 19, 1986, and it pulled off what a raw debut had only gestured toward. Spite, aimed with surgical calm, became craft.

Ask any working guitarist about this thing and watch the eye twitch begin. Riffs dodge exactly where an ear wants them to settle. “Wake Up Dead” lurches through shifting rhythms like a drunk tumbling down a fire escape, yet every stumble feels deliberately plotted. Chris Poland, the lead player back then, poured jazz phrasing across the rhythm bed until solos resembled a saxophone arguing with itself rather than any ordinary metal fireworks. Gar Samuelson attacked the kit with a swing lifted from fusion records, not the punk stomp powering much of the genre in that moment. Down below, David Ellefson ran actual counterpoint on bass. Four musicians, no filler, zero concern for your comfort.

The title cut alone rewired what a heavy song could sound like. That opening bass figure grew so iconic MTV News swiped it for a theme, a delicious irony once you clock the lyric sneering at the very machine beaming it into living rooms. Mustaine’s narrator fires back at a society eager to brand younger people irresponsible, faithless and unwilling to contribute. Every accusation receives a sarcastic answer, from questions about religion and employment to whether ordinary citizens still have a meaningful voice in their government. Beneath the sneer sits a willingness to embrace change, provided somebody can finally offer something that works. The song’s brilliance lies in that combination of frustration, humor and outright defiance.

Words carried as much weight here as fretwork, and that gap separated this bunch from a pack of peers content to shriek about Satan and velocity. Politics, media rot, private wreckage, religious hypocrisy: everything got skewered using a vocabulary you rarely met in the pit. “Devils Island” reads like a prison memoir. “Good Mourning/Black Friday” compresses a slasher film into nearly seven furious minutes. Even the Willie Dixon blues number, “I Ain’t Superstitious,” gets hauled through a thrash grinder and emerges mean instead of reverent. Clever never meant soft with these guys. The cleverness only meant the knife slid in cleaner.

Now, the elephant in the room. You cannot tell this saga without the group that showed the frontman the door, and the whole thing breathes through that wound. Every scorching passage plays like a letter mailed north to the guys who slotted Kirk Hammett into the vacant chair. Look what I built without you. Metallica had gone off and cut Master of Puppets that very year, a genuine colossus, and the timing sparked a rivalry destined to smolder across decades. Here comes the part that starts fights at the bar. Puppets won on scope and sales, no argument there, yet Peace Sells… but Who’s Buying? beats it on raw technical nerve, note for note, measure for measure. Nothing on Metallica’s masterwork twists and stutters with quite the same sick invention as “Wake Up Dead.” One camp prized the epic sweep. The other swore by the wired menace pouring out of the challenger, the noise of a man proving a point to everyone who ever doubted the enterprise.

What this album truly constructed, past any single riff, was an identity. Before that release, Dave risked ending up as a footnote in somebody else’s biography, the cautionary tale about drinking your way out of a legendary gig. Afterward, the world grasped the difference between two thrash titans. One brooded and towered. The other snarled, philosophized, and dared you to chase the fretboard gymnastics. Faster, nastier, wordier, funnier in odd corners. That eight-track statement drew a border and planted a flag in the ground. Megadeth no longer needed Metallica’s shadow to give the band a recognizable shape.

Four decades on, the reach remains enormous. The album helped establish a vocabulary that later generations of technical thrash and progressive metal musicians would continue exploring. Those abrupt rhythmic turns, jazz-influenced solos and tightly interlocking guitar passages demonstrated that aggression and musical sophistication could occupy the same cramped room without either surrendering an inch. Kids born long after 1986 still learn the title track the way jazz students learn “Giant Steps,” a rite of passage that either humbles you or forges you. Plenty of heavy records sound impressive until their production begins showing its age. This one still makes the listener work to keep up.

So where does the whole story sit right now? Fittingly, at the closing chapter. Megadeth’s 17th and final studio effort, a self-titled farewell released January 23, 2026, managed something none of the vintage classics ever pulled off. It debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 73,000 equivalent album units, including 69,000 in actual sales. The old warhorse topped the mountain at last. Cheekily, the record closes with a bonus cover of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning,” a composition Mustaine helped write before his dismissal. He described its inclusion as a way of paying respect to where his career began. After decades of feuding, competing and answering questions about the past, that decision carries a weight no ordinary cover song could match. The man who spent years trying to escape Metallica’s shadow finally revisited a piece of their shared history on his own terms.

The goodbye run stretches worldwide and into 2027, with James LoMenzo on bass, Teemu Mäntysaari handling lead guitar and Dirk Verbeuren driving the drums. A 24-date European stretch begins in March 2027, bringing Black Label Society and Testament along for the ride. Mustaine’s memoir, In My Darkest Hour, arrived September 8, offering a personal account of his cancer diagnosis, treatment and the frightening possibility of losing his voice and musical career. Having fought his way through throat cancer following his 2019 diagnosis, the guitarist now faces another physical challenge. During a September book event, he discussed Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition affecting his hand that has complicated his ability to play. He has made clear that the decision to bring Megadeth’s touring career to an end is tied to his desire to perform at the standard he expects of himself. That knowledge gives every remaining concert an added weight. For the faithful who never wandered off, watching the man responsible for so much of thrash metal’s vocabulary take his final bows means considerably more than hearing a familiar collection of songs one last time.

Spin that 1986 landmark tonight and the fury has not faded a single decibel. It roars like a young talent with everything to prove and a lifetime of grudges crammed into a Marshall stack. That is a long time for a warning to stay this loud. Vic Rattlehead still clutches the sign. Somebody out there keeps refusing to buy. And that stubborn refusal, more than any solo or scream, explains why the record still refuses to die.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Think about what Metallica turned into. Nearly 125 million albums sold worldwide, arenas on five continents, a film crew documenting their group therapy. Then think about where a teenage James Hetfield did his homework. Diamond Head. Four kids out of Stourbridge, England, who dropped “Lightning to the Nations” in 1980 and had already written “Am I Evil?” while most thrash founders were still learning barre chords. Lars Ulrich has admitted, plainly, that his own outfit would not exist without theirs. Yet the machine failed the teachers. Bad management, a botched jump to a bigger label, an ill-timed release called “Canterbury” that chased trends instead of setting them. The material was monstrous. Around it, the business stood like a house of cards.

Here sits the heart of the matter. Commercial success and greatness are not the same measurement, and confusing the two robs you of half the story.

Take King Diamond’s crew, Mercyful Fate. Denmark cooked up this coven. “Melissa” hit in 1983, “Don’t Break the Oath” a year after, and both records still play like a threat somebody actually meant. Hank Shermann and Michael Denner ran twin guitars that sounded lifted off an old horror soundtrack. Then there was King up top, hitting notes so high you half expected the windows to go. Corpse paint on his face years before any Norwegian teenager thought of it. Occult theatre delivered with total conviction. Did any of it go platinum? Not close. But when Metallica assembled a medley stitching five of those songs together, they were paying a debt, not doing a favor. Whole subgenres of extreme music trace their bloodline straight back to that Danish source.

Switzerland handed the world Celtic Frost, and few acts gambled harder for less reward. Tom G. Warrior started out in Hellhammer, which was basically noise and menace, then pushed it into something nobody had a name for. “Morbid Tales” and “To Mega Therion” are where death metal and black metal both got their marching orders, whether those later bands admit it or not. Nobody saw “Into the Pandemonium” coming in 1987. Strings, a woman singing, industrial noise, a Wall of Voodoo cover shoved in for reasons only Tom knew. The critics had no clue what to file it under. Sales stayed modest. History, though, keeps proving that album right. You can hear its ambition echoing through gothic, doom, and avant-garde heaviness decades on.

Doom deserves its own chapter here, because two American outfits practically wrote the manual while the mainstream looked elsewhere.

Chicago birthed Trouble. Black Sabbath lived in their DNA, no hiding it, but Trouble bent the thing sideways with lyrics that actually reached for something while the rest of the scene just wanted to mosh. Wagner didn’t sing so much as bleed. Behind him Rick Wartell and Bruce Franklin stacked riffs heavy enough to warp a floor. Even Rick Rubin bit, signing and producing the 1990 record himself, though it didn’t move the needle any more than the rest. They stayed a musician’s obsession more than a household name, revered by everyone who later dropped the tempo and cranked the fuzz.

Los Angeles gave us Saint Vitus, oddly enough on SST, a label built for hardcore punk. That mismatch tells you plenty. Dave Chandler’s playing sounded like a factory grinding to a halt, ugly and hypnotic. Scott Weinrich, Wino to everybody, took over the mic and they cut “Born Too Late” in 1986, and you could not ask for a title that fit better. The title track is about waking up and realizing you belong to some decade that already ended, which, for a band nobody was buying, hit a little close. Stoner rock, sludge, the entire distorted underground that blew up in the 90s owes these guys a rent check that will never be paid.

Kansas rarely enters this discussion, which is exactly why Manilla Road belongs in it. Wichita, of all places, produced Mark Shelton, a guitarist and storyteller who built cathedrals of epic fantasy out of nothing but ambition and a small budget. “Crystal Logic” from 1983 remains a holy relic among collectors, swords and sorcery and doom knit into songs that felt bigger than the band’s bank account ever allowed. Europe caught on well before America bothered to notice. Shelton just kept going, year after year with barely anyone watching, until he died of a heart attack in Germany in 2018, the morning after playing what became his final show. He went out doing what he had spent his life doing, playing for the faithful who always showed up. Most people never heard the name, and the ones who did will carry it the rest of their lives.

Word of mouth carried these names when nothing else would. Cassette dubs passed hand to hand at shows, fanzines run off on stolen office copiers, older heads schooling younger ones in basements and dusty shops. No algorithm decided any of this. Devotion did the lifting, and devotion has a longer memory than any marketing budget.

Notice the pattern threading through all six. Every band on this list fed something they’d never get to taste. The riffs, the bad attitudes, the stubborn refusal to clean up when the labels wanted radio songs, later acts scooped all of it up and rode it to numbers these guys couldn’t dream of.

So why did the money skip them? Reasons pile up. Timing, for starters, since arriving five years too early is its own kind of curse. Geography hurt, too, because a killer act stranded in Wichita or Copenhagen fought an uphill war against industry gravity centered in a few big cities. Managers fumbled contracts. Labels lost interest. Radio ignored anything that scared the advertisers. And plenty of these musicians simply refused to soften their vision for a paycheck, which is noble and ruinous in equal measure.

Follow that thread and it leads somewhere the sales obsessed folks won’t like. Cash registers often favor what feels familiar, what goes down easy, what a marketing guy can explain in one sentence. Real invention shows up messy and ahead of schedule and impossible to shelve. Scares off the casuals every time. The obsessives, though, they live for exactly that. Time sorts it out eventually. Give a great record twenty years and it stops mattering how many copies left the shelf on release week. What matters is how many players it turned into believers.

Play “Am I Evil?” back to back with the Metallica cover sometime. One version made a fortune. The other made the fortune possible. Both are worth your ears, yet only one carries the weight of having been first, of having imagined the thing before there was any proof it would work.

That is the real ledger. Not units sold but ideas spread, not gold but genealogy. Plenty of these greats died with empty pockets. Slept in vans, ate garbage, then watched somebody else cash the check their ideas wrote. Fair? Not even a little. But right in the end, yeah. Love this stuff long enough, dig under the surface a while, and it hits you that selling big and being great were never once the same thing. The acts who mattered most were often the ones counting the fewest receipts, and the verdict eventually, quietly, sets itself straight.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Reality is messier and a good deal cooler. While the London press was busy anointing kids from Sheffield and the East End, young players in Solingen, Copenhagen, Stockholm and the American heartland were welding their own version of loud together. Many were developing at considerable distance from one another. Nothing resembling today’s instant exchange of music and information existed yet. Nobody handed them a map. They just heard the same electricity crackling in the air and grabbed for it with both fists.

Take Germany. Accept were already at it in Solingen well before Helloween turned up or the Ruhr Valley thrash crowd got loud. Udo Dirkschneider fronted them, a squat guy with a voice like gravel tipped down a drainpipe, and nobody who caught it forgot the sound. Throw on Restless and Wild from 1982 and the opening shot is “Fast as a Shark.” It opens on this goofy little oompah folk bit, almost a gag, until somebody drags the needle off the record and the group barrels in. People love arguing about who birthed thrash. That intro settles more of the fight than most want to concede. The California thrash movement was still taking shape when Udo already had the throttle wide open. Twelve months on, Balls to the Wall delivered an anthem so thick you could chew it. These cats weren’t copying anybody. Germany was cooking with its own gas, and down in Hanover the Scorpions had been flying that flag since the early seventies. Wolf Hoffmann’s fretwork carried a classical spine half of Europe would spend the next decade chasing.

Roll north to Denmark, where a skinny singer in stark black and white occult makeup changed the temperature of an entire room. Melissa showed up in 1983 and King Diamond opened his mouth. Nothing out of England sounded remotely like it. He was hitting these witchy high shrieks that put grown men on edge, layering on candles and pentagrams and the full Satanic spook show, and the riffs holding it together were no joke at all. Anyone itching to file him under gimmick had to eat those words once the songs landed. Don’t Break the Oath came the next year and, somehow, went even further. Metallica took serious inspiration from those songs, later paying explicit tribute with a five song Mercyful Fate medley. A fat slice of the extreme underground that followed drew from Mercyful Fate too. One small Scandinavian country, punching a hole clean through the ceiling of what this music was allowed to be.

Sweden gets forgotten worst of all, which is a crime. Heavy Load formed in the mid seventies up in Stockholm, brothers Ragne and Styrbjorn Wahlquist at the wheel, and by the time Death or Glory landed in 1982 they were playing a triumphant style, all raised swords and mountaintop choruses, that anticipated plenty of what folks would later slap the “power” label on. Viking imagery. Soaring hooks. You could fit the production budget in a shoebox, yet the anthems still tower anyway. They ran their own imprint and released records through their own Thunderload label, answering to nobody. Purest strain of underground there is.

Then there’s home soil, and this is where the tidy tale gets downright insulting. America did not just wake up in 1983 when Metallica dropped Kill ‘Em All. Riot, out of New York City, had been grinding since the middle of the previous decade. Fire Down Under, released in 1981, is a stone classic that record executives fumbled so badly the group nearly broke apart over it. Guitar work on that thing screams. Vocals soar. It should have turned those players into superstars, yet instead it became a collector’s holy grail, whispered about in tape trading circles for ages. Out on the plains it gets stranger and better still. Wichita, Kansas of all places gave us Manilla Road, Mark Shelton’s outfit that treated fantasy novels and brooding epics like scripture. Crystal Logic arrived in 1983, and there is nothing polite about it. Shelton’s tone sounds like it was captured inside a grain silo, his voice an acquired taste that fans would go to war for, every song a doorway into some crumbling mythic realm. California had Cirith Ungol dragging Michael Moorcock paperbacks onto their sleeves and playing like the apocalypse was already booked. New York offered Virgin Steele reaching for the operatic. All of it happening at once, coast to coast, while the cameras stayed pointed across the pond.

Now here’s the part the fairy tale really can’t stand. Borders aren’t the only thing the canon erases. So who actually taught the electric guitar to scream, long before any of these guys strapped one on? Track it back to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel singer running a dirty tone and ripping leads in the 1940s that would embarrass a bunch of players who came later. That is not a reach. It is right there on the recordings if you bother to go listen. Chuck Berry drew the map nearly every riff still follows. Little Richard hollered loud enough to rattle the china while respectable folks clutched their pearls. Hendrix grabbed all of it and forced it through a wall of fuzz until it came out snarling. The family tree stretches far deeper than the moment somebody finally called the music heavy metal.

Fast forward and the same erasure keeps repeating. Bad Brains were pushing hardcore toward astonishing speeds by the end of the 1970s, while folding reggae into a sound almost nobody else could duplicate. Those D.C. guys were doing things that would echo through hardcore, crossover and the faster edges of metal for years. Stone Vengeance came together in 1978 in San Francisco, up in Hunters Point, and they played vicious. Barely a soul outside the Bay heard them, which is its own small tragedy. Sound Barrier were scorching Los Angeles stages in the early eighties too, and try locating them in the tidy reference books. Then 1988 hits, Living Colour struts onto MTV with “Cult of Personality,” and all of a sudden the business acts like it knew it all along. Footnotes, my foot. They were part of the foundation holding the whole roof up, painted over by whoever wrote the official version.

So why does the shorthand survive? Follow the ink. Britain had Sounds, Kerrang!, a press machine that ran in English and shipped worldwide, plus journalists eager to crown a homegrown movement. Language greased the wheels. The kid in Kansas, the quartet in Solingen, the Black group in Los Angeles got no such megaphone. Geography did some of the rest, since a scene photographs cleaner when the clubs sit an hour apart on the same rainy motorway. Comfort did the last bit, because a neat picture of who owns this music was easier to print than an honest one. Convenient beats accurate nine times out of ten, especially when there are copies to move.

None of this shrinks what the island did. Sabbath invented a vocabulary. Priest built the uniform. Those British kids lit something real, no argument there, and they earned the flowers they got. Fair is fair. Just don’t swallow the notion that the whole thing was born and buried on a grey little island packed with one type of guy. That bit is a fairy tale, and not even a good one.

Point is, this racket was boiling up all over the place across the same run of years, cooked up by folks working miles and sometimes oceans apart, a scattered lot of them chasing the identical gut pull while information traveled slowly and scenes grew on their own terms. Some sang in accented English. Others pressed records in a garage. Plenty had been building the foundation for decades while the credit floated elsewhere. All of them reached for the future with both hands. History books just took a while to catch up, and plenty of them, cozy with the old shorthand, still haven’t bothered.

Next time somebody recites the polished version, cue up “Fast as a Shark,” then Melissa, then Fire Down Under, then some Sister Rosetta and a jolt of Living Colour back to back. Watch the neat map fall apart, and the portrait right along with it. That there is the true record, and it belonged to every corner and each hand that ever plugged in, never to a single flag on a single grey coast.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Let me tell you why that matters.

A lazy assumption floats around these days, the idea that anything rooted in yesteryear must be a costume, a bit of nostalgia cosplay for dudes who peaked in 1984 and never moved on. That take crumbles the moment you drop the needle on Dreamkiller. Put out in 2022 through Relapse, the second Sumerlands record does not feel like a museum piece. It breathes. It’s hungry, cocky in a way most fresh acts only pretend to be. Arthur Rizk, guitarist and producer steering the ship, keeps a philosophy so plain it borders on stubborn. Stratocasters, nothing else. Amps pushed till they beg. Leads that actually travel somewhere instead of showing off. By the time the closer “Death to Mercy” breaks into its twin solo, I’m usually grinning like a fool. That is pure Thin Lizzy DNA, a jolt of early Maiden, and apparently nobody warned these boys it went out of fashion.

There’s real ache under all that polish, though, and that is the part of Sumerlands I can’t shake. Brendan Radigan, who took the microphone after Phil Swanson stepped away, sings like a man carrying a weight up a hill. Listen to “Heavens Above” or the sly ache of “The Savior’s Lie” and you catch echoes of Dio, of Dokken, of those glossy Foreigner ballads your uncle swore by. The synths shimmer like a neon sign buzzing over a wet street. This is craft. Every hook lands because somebody sat down and sweated over it, not because an algorithm suggested a chorus should go there.

Now drive south and west, all the way to Texas, and you find a different beast wearing the same armor.

Eternal Champion makes epic heavy metal soaked in swords, doomed kings, and the sort of battles Robert E. Howard used to dream up between whiskey and typewriter. Frontman Jason Tarpey happens to be that rare singer who also publishes fiction; he penned a sword-and-sorcery book called The Godblade while the crew hammered out a record cut from much the same cloth. Their 2020 opus Ravening Iron is a lean, muscular thing, eight tracks and not a wasted second among them. “A Face in the Glare” comes swinging like a broadsword. “Skullseeker” gallops. The riffing, courtesy of Rizk and John Powers, drips with the molten glow of Manilla Road and Cirith Ungol, those cult heroes the mainstream ignored for far too long.

Here’s the part nobody talks about enough. Both outfits share bloodlines. Rizk and Powers play in each one, and Brad Raub played bass in both as well, including on Dreamkiller and Ravening Iron. Raub passed in 2024, only 36 years old. You can’t discuss where either group stands today without pausing on that loss, because it changed everything and it changed nothing. The grief is real. The mission held.

Which brings us to right now, 2026, and a genuine surprise. Back in March, Eternal Champion dropped an EP called Friend of War with almost no warning. Two songs, just over thirty minutes, dedicated to pulp author Karl Edward Wagner and built around his novel Dark Crusade. The title cut is a thirteen minute odyssey that makes you itch to march over a frozen mountain range with steel in your grip. Its companion, “YSLSL,” stretches into eighteen minutes of pure atmosphere, dungeon synth fog rolling across the horizon. Purists grumbled. A few wanted nonstop galloping and felt cheated by the ambient turn. I get where they’re coming from. Me, I heard a band bold enough to follow its own nose, and honestly that kind of confidence is rare these days. When Friend of War arrived in March, the band indicated its third full length was planned for later this year. Six months into the wait, I’m plenty ready.

Here’s what those two prove, then.

People love to insist heavy metal has to mutate or die. Never bought it myself. Painters use oil. Cooks braise. Nobody demands a blues guitarist invent a brand new scale before he’s allowed to move you. Sumerlands and Eternal Champion understand this in their bones. This isn’t leftovers under a heat lamp. Big choruses, hooks that bite down hard, tales worth hollering at full volume. None of that ever spoiled. We just stopped feeding it.

Think about the machinery of the average hit today, sanded smooth, tested by committee, engineered to slip past you without leaving a mark. Then put on Ravening Iron at volume. That polished product wants your passive attention. This other thing wants your whole body. Guess which approach still gives me goosebumps at my age.

Scale matters here too. Neither act is chasing arenas. Small labels put the records out. The vinyl runs sell through fast, and festival crowds scream every lyric right back. That little scale is exactly the point. It pins them to the ground, a long way from the industry con men, honest without trying. When Radigan reaches for a high note or Tarpey bellows about a burning city, you believe them, because no marketing department sits in the room telling them to hold back.

I’ve spent my whole life chasing loud guitars. Trends rise and vanish, and by now I’ve buried more saviors of the form than I can count, every one forgotten inside a season. What separates these two from the pack is not novelty. It’s belief, flat out. They love a style the cool kids ditched ages ago, and they swing it harder than the originators ever managed. No apology offered, and none required.

Tradition was never the villain here. Lazy songwriting was. Sumerlands and Eternal Champion fixed that, one thunderous chorus at a time, and in the process they reminded a jaded head like me exactly why I fell for heavy metal in the first place. Crank it up. Let the neighbors wonder. That fire, it turns out, was never going out. Somebody just had to keep tending it.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.

Metallica sold the planet. Slayer scared your mother half to death. Megadeth had the man with the vendetta and a fretboard that flat refused to quit. Then, off to the side in skate shorts, grinning like they were in on a joke the rest of us missed, stood the outfit everybody loves to file fourth. Anthrax.

Now, deep into a new century, that same crew is about to hand us Cursum Perficio, arriving September 18, their first full studio effort since 2016. Ten years between studio albums, then this. The timing plays like a dare: keep sleeping if you want.

Let me back up a minute.

The “Big Four” tag was never a ranking of who mattered most. It grew out of the 1980s as shorthand for the four thrash bands that became the era’s biggest commercial forces. Sales mattered enormously, which is why those four names got carved into the tablet. Purists have argued ever since that Overkill or Exodus or Testament earned that fourth seat instead. Fine debate for a barstool. It also misses what actually happened.

Because while three of those groups came up on the West Coast breathing California smog, Scott Ian and company were a New York animal, born in Queens and shaped by the city’s hardcore pulse. You could hear the city in them. That East Coast blood gave the songs a bounce the others never had. And here’s the part the doubters always skip: these guys wrote hooks. Real ones. Joey Belladonna sang, actually sang, soaring clean over the riffs while his rivals barked and snarled. Melody folded inside all that speed made them a strange, singular proposition, and strange rarely gets its due while it’s happening.

Then there’s the stuff that had nothing to do with riffs.

Back in 1987, long before anybody slapped a genre label on the fusion, these New Yorkers dropped “I’m the Man” and welded rap to distorted guitar for laughs and for keeps. By 1991 they’d cut a fresh “Bring the Noise” with Public Enemy, then hauled Chuck D and Flavor Flav out on the road right beside them. Picture that bill for a second. Kids who’d never once cross paths, jammed shoulder to shoulder, hollering the same hook back at the stage. Nobody was writing papers on crossover yet. They just went and did it, loud, and left the room to sort itself out. It made heavy music feel bigger, curious, unafraid of the world outside its own moshpit.

They read, too. “I Am the Law” pulled Judge Dredd straight off the page and into the pit. Stephen King bled through plenty of their work, from the very name of that 1987 landmark set to horror nods buried down in the lyrics. Nerd culture worn as a badge of honor, decades before that became somebody’s marketing plan. When comic shops and record stores finally merged in the public imagination, these five had already been living there for ages.

So why the eternal shrug?

Some of it comes down to bad luck and worse timing. Then grunge showed up and ate everybody’s lunch. Belladonna was out, John Bush of Armored Saint was in, and the sound turned thicker and meaner, less sprint and more grind. Stuff like Stomp 442 held up fine, still does. Trouble was, the crowd that fell hard for that clear high tenor checked out the second a different guy grabbed the mic. The press moved on. Radio moved on. For a long stretch the whole genre got treated like a fossil, and this outfit took the brunt of the neglect even as it kept swinging hard.

What people forget is how many times these players got written off and simply refused to stay buried. Belladonna returned in 2010. Worship Music landed twelve months later and reminded everyone the fire never went out. For All Kings in 2016 proved it wasn’t a fluke. Through all of it, Charlie Benante sat behind the kit as one of the most underappreciated drummers in the history of aggressive music, a true architect of the double bass gallop. Ian’s right hand stayed the metronome of a whole movement, tight enough that folks have called him downpicking’s answer to Angus Young. Frank Bello brought the swagger. This was never a weak link. It was a machine that outlasted its critics.

Which brings us to the strange, perfect poetry of the fresh one.

Cursum Perficio is Latin, and Benante spotted the phrase on a tile at the entrance of Marilyn Monroe’s final home while watching a documentary. It reads, depending on your translator, as “my journey has come to an end” or “I complete my course.” Weighty words for guys who spent four decades being told their journey should have wrapped up long ago. They insist it isn’t a goodbye. Given who we’re talking about, I believe them. Persistence has always been the entire point. Their 1990 release, the one that earned a first Grammy nod, was literally titled for the passage of time. Full circle stuff.

The record got cut at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 with Jay Ruston helping shape the sound, and for once the roster held steady, same five faces as last go-round, no drama, nobody replaced. The early singles back up the noise. “It’s For the Kids” swings with that classic gang vocal snarl. “The Edge of Perfection” and “Everybody’s Got a Plan” show veterans with nothing left to prove and everything to enjoy. There’s a looseness in it, the sound of players who lasted long enough to have fun again.

And that’s the whole argument, really. You want to know who got shortchanged in that famous quartet? It was always the crew dismissed for being too fun, too melodic, too willing to hug a hip hop icon or quote a comic book. The seriousness police docked them points for smiling. Meanwhile they quietly built one of the deepest, most human catalogs in the entire style, and pulled it off while the culture kept declaring them finished.

Time is the cruelest judge any artist ever faces. Reviews fade. Reunion checks clear and get forgotten. Whatever slot you drew on somebody’s ranked list stops mattering the day it prints. All time ever really asks is whether you’re still standing. Forty plus years on, this crew is preparing to answer again on September 18, with a batch of songs that swing like men who’ve got something to prove all over again. The last laugh belongs to the guys in the skate shorts. Turns out the joke was on everybody who counted them out.

Staff Writer; Kirk Robinson

This man is a Rockhead with a deep appreciation for rock, country, folk, blues, heavy metal and the musical traditions that connect them. He writes about artists, albums, music history and the sounds that continue to shape generations. Feel free to contact him at KirkR@TheBRHM.com.