My top 5 Metal Subgenres

Probably I'm going to blogpost about other kinds of music in the future so...yeah...that's just the beginning folks.

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This is the music genre in which I identified myself the most trough all my teenage era, this for me is the age of enlightenment of metal, this is where I found the most brilliant compositions and lyrics in all metal music and the music genre which gave me the strongest emotions while I was listening to music. Dream Theater, Opeth, Pain of Salvation, Haken, even Porcupine Tree to some extent, Haken, The Contortionist and my favorite band of all time: Between the Buried and Me. These are very different groups but at the same time all of them can cover all the emotional spectrum without losing their rational part and create strong atmospheres. This is personally the peak of metal.

Hear me out, in this case I'm using "Black Metal" as an umbrella terms that includes most of its subgenres, such as Pagan/Viking Metal, Blackgaze (which is also included in the Post Metal point but I'm going to get there in a while), Atmospheric Metal, DSBM (Depressive and Suicidal Black Metal, a real guilty pleasure of mine to some extent). In all of this I'm keeping out, for logical reasons, NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) because I'm not a fucking nazi and if you're please get out of here. One day I will blogpost about NSBM for sure because it is a controversial topic that most of the people (even black metal fans, at times) don't really understand.

The thing with black metal for me is that, if you consider only the first two waves of BM, it can be pretty boring and not so interesting (at least musically speaking), BUT if you consider all the subgenres of BM it can be a pretty diverse genre that has a lot to offer. Some of my favorite bands are Ulver (I mean the early stuff ofc), Deafheaven, Havukruunu, Mgla, Drudkh, Deathspell Omega, Këkht Aräkh, Paysage d'Hiver and yeah, even the infamous Burzum, who doesn't make NSBM music.

Speaking of poetic stuff, there's no way I could've left this one out of my list. Gothic Metal is THE poetic metal at its fullest. Theatre of Tragedy, Katatonia (early stuff), Tristania, My Dying Bride, Draconian, Paradise Lost, The Sins of Thy Beloved, Swallow the Sun, and many others captured the dark yet sad and melancholic side of Doom Metal, and they used instruments like piano, flutes and sometimes even violins to make truly atmospheric pieces of art where I can get lost in them for hours and hours. Sadly, this specific subgenre of metal never got so popular, or well, it did if we consider bands like Lacuna Coil or Evanescence "Gothic Metal", but now I'm not talking about THAT kind of Gothic Metal. Sure, they aren't bad, but I don't like them as much as the older Gothic Metal because to me, they sound too polished and less "intense" emotionally. And on top of that, is hard to find Gothic Metal fans who actually prefer the Death Doom Metal influences rather than the Alternative Metal influence in the genre. I want to give this moment of appreciation to a truly underrated genre.

Another genre that sometimes doesn't get enough recognition from metalheads is this one. I have to admit that I didn't listen to many bands of this genre but...the few I listened just blew my mind away and that was enough to make it to this list. Like Prog Metal, this is a pretty diverse genre as well. Cult of Luna, The Ocean, Agalloch, Tool (yeah I don't consider Tool a prog metal band, sorry not sorry), Kayo Dot, those are all Post Metal bands but they're so different from each other, they include influences from any other genre existing, from classical to jazz, from folk to electronic music, it's just so fun (and somehow depressing) to dig into these bands. Sometimes I find hard to define which is the real difference between Progressive, Post and Avant-garde Metal, but Post metal is surely the one that feels the most "meditative" to me, and I love it because of that.

To end this list, how could I not talk about Death Metal? One of the music genres I listened the most trough my teenage years and I can't help but saying that is so cool, from the old school death metal to the most avant-garde and experimental bands. There isn't even that much to say because I can't even put into words how this music makes me feel when it is done in the right way. Death, Cannibal Corpse, Entombed, Dismember, Nile, Necrophagist, Beyond Creation, Gorguts, Atheist, Ulcerate...the list could go on for hours, but this is the music that pumps up my energy like nothing else. I love Death Metal so much.