(TheBRHM.com) Few stretches expose the widening fault line inside heavy metal as sharply as the middle of the eighties, when the genre put forward two rival answers to a single question: what is all this noise actually for? One arrived drenched in blood and speed, Slayer’s Reign in Blood compressing ...

(TheBRHM.com) You could argue rock got knocked sideways by three guys who never asked for the job. Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic started Nirvana in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1987, and when Dave Grohl joined in 1990, the lineup that would crack the whole thing open was finally in place. The ...

(TheBRHM.com) Iron Maiden stood at the kind of crossroads in the autumn of 1986 that has quietly ended more than a few careers in heavy metal. The World Slavery Tour had ended the previous summer, leaving the band exhausted, and now the five of them faced a hard question. Grow, ...

(TheBRHM.com) Every genre keeps a few official saints, and the loud stuff runs the same way. Iron Maiden gets the theatrical operas about mummies and fighter planes. Judas Priest gets the leather and studs mythology. Sabbath, rightly, gets handled like scripture. Sitting just beneath those household names, though, was a ...

(TheBRHM.com) Walk into any argument about the titans of heavy music and someone always reaches for a sales figure. Platinum plaques, chart peaks, stadium gates, the full scorecard of commerce. That scorecard lies far more often than it tells the truth. A handful of the most vital names in this ...

(TheBRHM.com) Crack open almost any history of the genre and the plot runs identical. Birmingham birthed Black Sabbath. Judas Priest sharpened the blades, then a swarm of leather kids calling themselves the New Wave of British Heavy Metal hauled the whole thing into the 1980s. Maiden. Saxon. Diamond Head. Tidy ...

(TheBRHM.com) Angel Witch never got their due, and that has bothered me for forty years. The London band recorded a debut in 1980 that most metalheads now count among the defining records of the new wave of British heavy metal. Iron Maiden came up in that same wave. So did ...

(TheBRHM.com) In a recent Drumeo clip, Ray Luzier’s drum tech Mark Bennett held up a discontinued Pearl Copper Free Floating snare and let a secret slip. That copper drum, he explained almost offhand, is what Luzier used while tracking the new Korn record. Fourteen albums in and now working on ...