Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
I’ve been working on this column for three years as of this month after Langdon extended an offer to me to join them, noting my insistence to not “leave them alone” as “a sign of a persistence in one’s work ethic.” In that time, I’ve only become more distanced from the overall shape of mainstream metal. It largely features two camps; the headlining class of yesteryear’s metal acts and the “-core” periphery, an intentionally amorphous term referring to the descendants of metalcore that dominate streaming platforms. In 2025, within a two-month timeframe, both parties will have experienced a definitive event. Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s retirement gig will occur on July 5th, and earlier this month, Sleep Token went number No. 1 on the Billboard charts with Even in Arcadia.
I don’t think Sabbath retiring mere months after Sleep Token asserted streaming supremacy is a sign of metal’s decline any more than it is a funny coincidence, but what is interesting is that they represent a different reality than the one often found in underground metal. Doug Moore (whose newly released record you’ll read about below) diagnosed it on Bluesky, writing, “So much of contemporary metal culture is people being nostalgic for shit they didn’t live through in the first place.” As broad as his words are, and as much as nuance dies under any character limit, he’s correct, if you recognize that the word that’s lifting 95% of the statement’s weight is “nostalgic.” That is what kills innovation.
Nostalgia implies pining for the pleasures of a specific time without considering its thorns. It’s revisionism. And, as someone who routinely forages through Metal-Archives for new releases, too many bands revise by picking their favorite aspects from certain eras and calling it a day. It’s what gives rise to groove metal bands that sound like Five Finger Death Punch hired an Exhorder roadie as a songwriter, or how a band can call themselves “avant-garde death metal” but sound like P.O.D. It’s looking at singular aspects of a work and plucking them without a framework in which they can thrive. The ideas are there, and they may be well executed, but much of it feels like upholding a relic rather than digging deeper into its sinews, putting it in a new light, embellishing it with new thoughts, or, hell, throwing in some blast beats.
And I’m not so dense to see that we’ve covered albums that do not inch a genre forward but instead execute their premises extremely well. This is where the distinction between nostalgia versus reverence arises. It’s minor in scale but critical in practice. It’s in the way the artist dictates the form rather than the other way around, in that the traits of a revived style must bend to the abilities of the musician rather than the musician arching their back to limbo under a genre’s stringent rules. Most good OSDM bands, like early Tomb Mold, understood this, and it’s why they succeeded beyond just giving you a hint of the good ol’ days. They made music that roughly fit that mold and added passages and deviations that weren’t being made in death metal’s old-school heyday.
What’s ironic about all this pontificating is that, for the most part, May’s best metal albums have not simply been exemplary executions of a framework. Drouth’s The Teeth of Time may be the exception, but it’s not looking backwards so much as it is sharpening melodic black metal. Instead, May has celebrated thought-provoking and forward-thinking releases that exist without the pretense of “pushing their genre forward.” They state their cases on individual levels, moreso exploring terrains that you wonder why more artists don’t also venture into. It’s a less sexy but more sustainable form of progress, the sort that ultimately leads to tangible results.
— Colin Dempsey
Content shared from consequence.net.