Decibel continues to bring extremity to Apple Music playlists

You’ve probably got countless records, CDs, and cassettes in your collection, as well as subscriptions to various streaming services, but you’re going to want to carve out a bit more time in 2019 to let us at Decibel do further damage to your hearing. We put up two new playlists over at Apple Music every week, and, if you haven’t been checking them out yet, that should really change, starting right about now.

Every issue, we make a playlist featuring the bands in that issue; we also shoot out a playlist spotlighting just the cover artist, diving deep into their history for a comprehensive soundtrack to spin while you read our in-depth feature story.

Occasionally, when I don’t feel like doing my job, we get a band who has a new album coming out to guest curate a playlist; some artists that guest curated playlists for us this year were Phil Anselmo, Pig Destroyer, KEN mode and Harms Way. Sometimes we create a playlist based around a story at the site—you read what five albums changed Trevor Phipps from Unearth’s life, for example, now spin our playlist featuring tracks from those albums. You read our list of the most successful singer swaps in metal history; listen to our playlist to compare the old singers to the new ones.

We publish playlists based around The Decibel Tour, our Metal & Beer Fests, and our special issues. New book coming out through our book publishing division? Yup, there’ll be an accompanying playlist.

Our new Decibel Legends series looks at a particular individual who we’ve deemed to be important in metal history—our first three were John Bush, Rich Hoak, and Thomas Gabriel Fischer—and spins some of their best material. And when one of our fellow metal soldiers falls, it’s the least we can do to create a playlist honoring their contributions to the cause.

And sometimes, we just get random. We did a playlist looking back at when Columbia Records dabbled in death metal in the ’90s; we made one in the spirit of a 1997 mixtape; another was songs about spiders. Sometimes we look back on a particular year in metal and create an epic, hours-long playlist. Speaking of long, we did an eight-hour playlist of 12 very, very, very long songs this year; we also did a playlist of 12 grindcore songs that totalled one minute (and it was totally awesome). We did a playlist of songs about books, and one time, because we’re all very mature individuals around here, we did a playlist about poop.

Don’t blow it. Find us on Apple Music today.