Sometimes, when we’re not putting out a monthly magazine, an annual special issue or books about metal, and when we’re not organizing our annual tour or Metal and Beer Fests, and we’re not constantly updating our site, and we’re not organizing and putting out monthly flexis with exclusive tracks from the best metal bands out there, we think we need to be doing something else to keep ourselves busy. Cranking out two playlists a week on Apple Music for our readers to bang heads to? Perfect.
This past year, we had playlists for each of our issues, offering up tracks from some of the bands featured on the pages so you can get some raging audio to go with your extreme visual. We deep-dove into some of the cover artists’ catalogue as well, offering a comprehensive look at the discographies of the bands we deemed worthy to be on our front page.
We spent a bunch of time this year highlighting all the bands playing our Metal and Beer Fests, and the bands on our annual Decibel Tours, giving you a chance to sample and spend some time with the groups we think are certifiably 100-percent ass-kickers.
We did a Halloween playlist with songs about zombies; we did a massive 43-song Paradise Lost playlist celebrating our Decibel Books release of No Celebration; we spotlighted some now-defunct underground legends (such as the mighty His Hero Is Gone) and offered up a soundtrack to some of our Retrospective stories from our site (Cerberus Shoal’s …And Farewell to Hightide and Failure’s Magnified, for example).
Speaking of our site, we made some playlists to tie in to other stories there, such as when we spun songs from five heavy albums that changed Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky’s life.
We had some fun looking at hair metal that actually ruled (hello, Hanoi Rocks) and rap-metal that actually didn’t suck (wuzzup, Candiria?). We took a look back at our own history when we celebrated 15 years of publication with a playlist of bands who were on our covers in our first year (hi, As I Lay Dying!). We looked at Cathedral’s non-album tracks. We devoted a playlist to Relapse Records’ releases from the year 2000 because holy shit.
The playlists are going to keep going strong into 2020. Don’t blow it: find Decibel on Apple Music today.
