Map of Metal

Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.

Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.

HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.

Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.

Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!

Do you disagree with hardcore punk influence as being one of the key disambiguation between thrash from speed metal? Personally at least that's what I feel. I do understand this means for example a lot of Metallica won't count as thrash but I like to say if you slow down Metallica it sounds more like Black Sabbath while slowed down Slayer or Anthrax sounds quite different, so I feel there may be a hard physical evidence for my theory. I found it a bit odd you didn't have this aspect written in the statements about differences between speed metal and thrash metal.

I do like and agree that you put Slayer - Necrophiliac under the development of death metal. Though by those same accounts I'd have moved Kreator - Ripping Corpse from the thrash column to the death metal column, but that's just a personal line.

Thanks so much for this write up. It’s not often thought of that when you put something weird and experimental online just for fun that you’re signing up for years of careing and feeding. But that’s also kind of nice, it makes you go engage with your cool thing long after your impulse drove you to make it.

This is a cool thing. I hope you enjoyed remembering about it again today.

Very cool. Explored a lot of nodes, rekindled some old bands. I was wondering how this was vibe coded, since it was done so well, art wise. Then I read your post. This has such a different feel for whatever is usually made today, I really enjoyed it. Cheers

Your map was very formative for me when I was exploring metal, thanks a lot !

I would love for this Map to be expanded to modern subgenres. There are lot's of subgenres that completely changed in the last decades (notably, the *cores and the tech* ...)

And it's definitely missing Thall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV9pcHh8vM). :D

This is an awesome visualization. I have always enjoyed 'structural taxonomies' as a way of visualizing data relationships. I appreciate you keeping it alive.

Very awesome. Thanks for sharing and for making this. Reminds me of the Metal Evolution documentary by BangerTV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmiqVYZHTIQ&list=PLgzW3ulw6T...

This was hugely influential on a younger me! I remember tracing forward and backwards from the bands I liked, finding and checking out new bands at every stop. Thank you!

Source code repository: https://github.com/patrickgalbraith/mapofmetal.

> It still has those Flash vibes I think.

I can say I noticed. I wondered if the site had been Flash.

I was looking through this, seeing the years radius and having my expectations validated/refuted was really fun! Lots of yeah but no, or no way but yeah? The curation of it is really respectable no matter my own taste and that is something that is in real low stock. Thanks for making my day and I'll add a few respectful issues when I can

Any chance to get a high resolution photo of the sketchbook version? Would love to also have a look at that :)

Very nice! As soon as I saw the landing page and the loading/start button I immediately thought of Flash.

Absolutely fantastic project! I completely understand you've got other things going on, but for me on Firefox mobile, I'm seeing a YouTube pop-up window for Black Sabbath and I don't see any obvious way to close it.

Maps, a great way to present music. Congrats for the work, brought back fond memories.

I see you chose the superior version of 43% Burnt by Dillinger. It blows my mind that he never became the new vocalist.

So glad you took the time to keep the site alive!

i haven't seen this since the flash days. so cool. glad you ported it so it's still accessible!

Do you mean reference material for individual metals and alloys or an overview of materials science/metallurgy as a whole?

That’s interesting. Somehow my brain never really put that together. He was obviously ripping heavy blues and innovated more than anyone before and arguably since. Thanks for adding him into my mental Metal flow chart.

For me I would always say that somewhere between 68-71 metal was being cooked up by Black Sabbath in Birmingham, Motörhead in London, Pentagram in Virginia, and Blue Cheer in San Francisco. Obviously Hendrix’s influence would be most obvious with the latter.

I started learning guitar in 2006 and my guitar teacher pointed out how metal originated from Hendrix's sound. I always thought that was common knowledge

In my opinion Hendrix is to electric guitar what Beethoven was to (Western) harmony. All contemporary lines go through him.

One thing to note though is that Hendrix had a very short career in which he lived/performed in Nashville, the Chitlin' Circuit, Greenwich Village, and London. On top of being an incredibly proficient/creative guitar player he also had an incredible ear and picked up sounds/techniques/songs from everywhere he lived and with everyone he played with.

Part of why you can trace the evolution of guitar playing through Hendrix is that on top of his records being popular and everyone learning those tunes as a first/second year student, his own musicological background was a fusion of the major songwriting movements of the 1960s that spawned modern blues, pop, funk, fusion, rock, and metal. It's easy to see Hendrix as an influence on modern music because he was a magnet for players of all those genres.

What's interesting about Hendrix is that he is "an artist you listen to" instead of "an artist who an artist you listen to, listens to" from the same era like Albert King or Joe Pass.

Very curious the conspicuously absent genre in your list, especially given how much of modern doom is death metal. I can't help much with traditional doom however as I don't listen to it much, I just found it a bit funny you never encountered modern death metal during your searches for slow metal.

FWIW, There's a lot of new bands sounding like the old classic Metal bands, they are `tagged` as NWOTHM (New Wave of Traditional Heavy Metal), such as:

- White Wizzard

- Tailgunner

- Skull Fist

- Wolf

- Enforcer

- 3 Inches of Blood

- Lucifer

- and many others

Doom, stoner doom, stoner sludge.

Bands like Sleep, OM, Electric Wizard, Weedeater, Dopesmoker, Satans Satyrs, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Salems Pot, Acid Witch… there’s so so many.

Also heavier bands that are more stoner/psych than metal like All Them Witches, Mars Red Sky, Dead Meadow, Aunt Cynthia’s Cabin, all rip too.

The Sword might be what you're looking for - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL7ndxWgW5A

You can maybe checkout https://hate5six.com/sage this lets you pick what you like and also what you don't like and tries to categories by percentage.

Bands that you are saying. Maybe Hangman's Chair, Pallbearer, Faetooth, Rezn, Conan, and Monolord.

You ever heard of Every Noise at Once? You can search for an artist, see the genres they belong to, and then look for artists nearby in 2D musical space (oversimplified a bit to be fair) within that genre. I've found it's generally pretty accurate, and I've found plenty of new artists this way.

Unfortunately no longer being updated, but still has a fantastic backlog of new-ish artists.

The original Ishkur's Guide is even more similar, here's a modern recreation of it: https://igorbrigadir.github.io/ishkurs-guide-dataset/

Wow thanks for sharing, went straight to Eurotrash and it didn't dissapoint

The descriptions are a bit more tongue-in-cheek, though. I love it.

I get the thematic connection but I feel like Blind Guardian is an institution whereas the Diggy Diggy Hole band is perhaps in a different league with a more selective core fan base and a song that has novelty appeal.

No offense to dwarf metal fans intended.

It's interesting because some of these bands are older than these terms. Alcest wasn't considered blackgaze until albums inspired by their own sound became popular, for example.

Metal also has history where a genre is aesthetically defined as well as sonically, which complicates things.

I can't thank you enough for mentioning Agalloch! I used to listen to them so much in university but somehow completely forgot about them until I read this comment!

I'm going to lose myself to "The Mantle" this weekend (best part is that I can now learn to play these songs on guitar). Thank you so much again - you made my day!

I see Tiamat at Goth Metal.

Oh, that kind of metal and EDM.

I clicked into this thread expecting hobbyist/hacker machining with steel and brass and aluminum, and was surprised to see someone getting into electrical discharge machining. Those hair-fine wires, milled graphite electrodes, and ultrapure water baths can achieve incredible precision but are challenging even in an industrial context, though I know a few have made it work in their garage.

But you meant electronic dance music.

Check out the band smash stereo, and check out the doom (2016) and doom the dark ages sound tracks.

electro-industrial?

I was hoping it was a metallurgical table myself but was pleasantly surprised with a map of my favorite music genre. Win either way.

I was enjoying this until I started reading the descriptions of the genres. The person that made this is very opinionated and not afraid to say what they think about certain genres they do not like!

that's pretty cool, thanks!

Ahh yes, the origin of this classic clip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkl4Yeh-BTo

Where can I find a full resolution version of that image?

Me too. Maybe someone can find a data source and vibe up a mapofmetals.com in the same style.

Swedish death is a specific sound like Entombed, which is fairly different than melo-death bands like In Flames.

I'm not entirely sure why those specific song choices for the Swedish Death category. The older At The Gates albums are more like the original Swedish sound but Slaughter of the Soul (included in Swedish Death) is essentially THE Melo-death album.

It's common enough that they are sold as an accessory. Search for "metal bullet belt".

I see Yngwie, I also upvote.

Grateful it's not an agentic start-up.

Sludge metal, where else...

Looking at the source, it seems to be using OpenSeadragon[0].

[0] https://openseadragon.github.io/

As a German, metal umlauts look so confusing

Mike Shinoda is fine with not being classified as Nu Metal https://blabbermouth.net/news/linkin-parks-mike-shinoda-says...

Anarchist/socialist are such funny words to put a slash between. They seem like such polar opposite political structures

Punk is for politics and Metal is for Partying.

Yeah very good song choices there.