Alestorm performing on the main stage at Hellfest 2022, with their inflatable duck and a pirate-ship backdrop

Genre Histories

Pirate Metal: From Under Jolly Roger to the Tavern Singalong

A riff about pirates on a Hamburg speed metal record in 1987, a Scottish studio project twenty years later, and a chorus built like a shanty: how pirate metal was made and why the joke holds.

By Julien Vasseur 16 October · 9 min read

From the Magazine

Histories · Biographies · Essentials →

A singing guitarist of Running Wild at a microphone in a bandana and a studded black jacket with gold trim, a burst of flame behind him and the band's skull-and-crossbones backdrop at the right edge of the stage

Essential Albums

The Best Power Metal Albums of the 90s

The nineties made two incompatible kinds of power metal record inside five years, and what separates them is not speed, country or subject. It is whether the sung line is fastened to the rif...

By Julien Vasseur

Manilla Road on stage at Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn, October 2017: the singer leans into the microphone with both arms thrown open, a guitarist at the left and the drummer under a skull-and-crossbones backdrop at the right.

Essential Albums

The Best Power Metal Albums of the 80s

Ten records, and one of them would pass an audition for the genre as it is now described. The 80s power metal albums fail a test that was written out of them afterwards, which is why the dec...

By Julien Vasseur

A Stratovarius guitarist playing a white guitar on stage, the band's name on the backdrop behind him

Explainers

The Key Change: Power Metal's Favourite Trick

The last chorus lifted a semitone or a whole tone: what a key change does, why pop calls it the truck driver's gear change, the lazy lift against the prepared modulation, and why power metal...

By Julien Vasseur

From the Team

The whole team →

Eirik Solvang Black Metal The Black Metal Records Collectors Chase

Andrzej Sawicki Blackened Death Viking, Folk and Everything Else Death Metal Absorbed

Rafael Quintero Death Metal The Death Metal Records Collectors Chase

Gareth Llewellyn Grindcore The Underrated Sludge Metal Albums

Ilse Brandt Doom Metal The Doom Metal Fonts

Declan Rourke Heavy Metal Heavy Metal vs Rock

Reviews

All reviews →

7.5 The Eternal Obscured Horizons

8.0 Suffering Quota Sisyphean Life

8.5 Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats Shapes of Midnight

7.5 Anthrax Cursum Perficio

8.0 Hansen Born with a Hammer

8.0 Krallice Scour Order

On This Day

16 October

25 years Ozzy Osbourne Down to Earth 2001

20 years Triosphere Onwards 2006

20 years Anaal Nathrakh Eschaton 2006

20 years Heimdalls Wacht Der Untergang der alten Welt 2006

20 years Torture Squad Chaos Corporation 2006 · EP

11 years Saxon Battering Ram 2015

Release Calendar

Full calendar →

Date	Band	Album	Type
16 Oct 2026	Gloryhammer	Space 1993: Wrath of Kor-Virliath	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Insomnium	Netherworlds	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Insomnium	Netherworlds (24-bit HD audio)	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Carnation	Symphony in Flesh	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Shores Of Null	Homesick	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Temperance	Arcani	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	The Keening	Devotion	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Stoned Jesus	Songs to Moon	Full-length
16 Oct 2026	Master	Among the Seeds of Death	Full-length