(TheBRHM.com) The origin of heavy music has no single author. Several acts on two continents were shoving toward the same loud, ugly place by the end of the sixties, blowing out speakers and scaring their own engineers. What sets Black Sabbath apart is not arriving first. It was what those ...

(TheBRHM.com) Aerosmith engineered one of the strangest comebacks in American music, and hardly anybody frames it as a cautionary tale. Eleven years separate Permanent Vacation from the moment this band finally scored a number one single, and across that stretch an outfit the industry had written off became a permanent ...

(TheBRHM.com) The distance between what Mötley Crüe swore in public and what the group eventually started selling at the merch table has stretched wide enough by now to qualify as the defining fact of their late career. Table needs setting first, though. My records never sorted themselves properly. Shout at ...

(TheBRHM.com) There is a persistent myth in music writing that says loud guitars were dying in 1987 and five degenerates from Hollywood arrived to resuscitate them, which is a nice story that happens to be false in almost every detail. Guitars were doing just fine. You could not escape them. ...

(TheBRHM.com) Something’s been eating at me lately. It’s one of those questions that won’t leave me alone once it shows up, and it shows up every time somebody puts these two names next to each other. I have had this argument my whole life. Barbershops. Parking lots after shows. Text ...

(TheBRHM.com) Every few months somebody drags the same argument back out into the daylight, usually in a comment section, usually with a Slayer avatar. Heavy music got soft. Heavy music got sold. And the finger always points at one place. The story goes that metalcore ruined everything. Soft choruses. Screaming ...

(TheBRHM.com) There was a time when heavy metal could be identified the way you identify a voice on the telephone. Not the genre. Not the era. The specific artist, in the space of a few seconds, before a lyric arrived to help you. That was the standard the music set ...

(TheBRHM.com) Spend enough years as the only brother in the pit and you learn the oldest argument in metal never really ends, the one about who plays the hardest. Somebody always brings up odd time signatures like a man pulling out a receipt. Somebody else name drops a conservatory. Every ...

(TheBRHM.com) Metal circles have been repeating something for thirty years without checking it. Pantera invented groove metal, they say. Nah. Anybody who tells you that either was not listening close or was not listening long. Exhorder was down in New Orleans developing that slow, mean, swaggering attack on late eighties ...

(TheBRHM.com) After many years spent in the pit, I’ve earned the right to raise something most of us in this scene would rather leave unspoken. The biggest festival posters of the 2026 cycle look almost exactly like the ones I was staring at back in the nineties. Same faces. Same ...