Taking a pause to observe the dynamic power of the connective, lucrative tie between five decades of bands, including the Dead Kennedys, X, Sepultura, Atreyu, Avenged Sevenfold, and Killswitch Engage
At some point, it’s logical to believe that people stop being mad at the world and embrace joy. However, it’s also logical to believe that some people stay mad and spend the rest of their lives devising a perpetuity of new ways to get even with the universe.
Related, here are three statements worth considering when contemplating, after five decades, the enduring and intersecting histories of hardcore, heavy metal, metalcore, and punk:
Eternal flames occur when underground reservoirs release flammable gases such as methane, ethane, and propane through fractures or openings in the rock to the surface.
Heat tempers steel.
Science isn’t music, but both are arguably arts that keep the world lively and logical.
For a forthcoming Revolver feature, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Brandon Saller, lead singer of veteran metalcore act Atreyu, about their new album, “The End Is Not the End.”
Dig back through five decades of loud, heavy music. There are clear lines connecting what Atreyu did as teenagers in Orange County, California’s late-’80s hardcore scene to what was happening in San Francisco with punk icons Dead Kennedys at the Mabuhay Gardens, and in a dozen California scenes that produced Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Fear, and X by the turn of the 1980s.
Follow that lineage outward, and you land in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1984, where “The End Is Not the End” collaborator Max Cavalera was shaping Sepultura. From there, the thread runs back into California-born metal acts like Avenged Sevenfold, and further into what bands such as Killswitch Engage were achieving just north of Hartford, Connecticut.
It’s a literal globe of bands, many founded by kids no older than sixteen.
Stereotypically, teenagers question everything and are perpetually frustrated by the world around them. So the idea persists that the root system for hardcore, heavy metal, metalcore, and punk — like an eternal flame tempering steel into hardened weapons — will always exist.
What keeps that flame from burning out? Evolution, innovation, and, yes, new pressures that keep kids — and the adults they grow into — angry and unsatisfied with the world around them.
Saller notes in a forthcoming Revolver feature that “emotionally touching feelings shared in an open forum” is how the group now processes its anger — not necessarily about the world at large anymore, but, in the case of The End Is Not the End’s lead single, “Dead,” about “how hard it is to give someone what they want or need when they don’t know what that thing is. It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love themselves.”
Whether in sound or style, hardcore, heavy metal, metalcore, and punk reflect the development of coherent strategies for youthful antagonism into an impressively lucrative industry.
Eternal flames occur when underground reservoirs release flammable gases such as methane, ethane, and propane through fractures or openings in the rock to the surface.
Heat tempers steel.
So, yes, while science assuredly isn’t music, both are arguably arts that, especially when used in tandem, keep the world lively and logical.
