Whoa, that was a crap year. It’s pretty much universally agreed upon that, thanks to COVID-19, 2020 sucked. But because you need some good stuff to look forward to, we at Decibel Enterprises Inc. persevered, and we’re going to continue bringing you all the noise in 2021. And part of that noise are our playlists at Apple Music.
Twice a week, we bring you a new themed playlist to help pass the time, whether you’re locked down, kinda locked down or back scrubbing the toilets at work.
Once a month, we have a playlist with the bands in our new issue; we usually also devote a playlist to our cover star and deep-dive into their history.
When a band has a new album coming out (or sometimes just at random), we sometimes hit them up to guest curate a playlist for us, like we did this year with members of Fuck the Facts, Dropdead, Brave the Cold, Oceans of Slumber, 16, Hirax, ACxDC, Lamb of God, Vader, and others.
Daniel Lake, author of our latest book, USBM, guest curated a playlist for us this year, as did Martin Popoff, author of a trilogy of books about Rush, and Decibel’s Shawn Macomber, who guest curated a 17-song Bang Tango (!) playlist, which ties in to Macomber’s excellent Gasping for Hair column on our site.
Our playlists tie in to other stories on our site, as well: a playlist with the five albums that changed Corporate Death of Macabre’s life, or Shane Embury of Napalm Death’s life, for example.
We did a series of playlists spotlighting the albums in our Decibel Hall of Fame Anthology: Volume III book this year, and, of course, we always take time to make a spooky playlist for that most metal of holidays, Halloween.
Sometimes we take a moment to honour our fallen comrades, like we did this year with Riley Gale of Power Trip, Reed Mullin of Corrosion of Conformity, Sean Reinert of Cynic/Death, Sean Malone of Cynic, Neil Peart of Rush and Jason Rainey of Sacred Reich. RIP, brothers.
We counted down the top 100 metal albums of the decade, the top 40 of 1995, and the top 40 of 2020, as well. We even had a member of the mighty Mare make a playlist of the best tracks from both Use Your Illusion records.
Don’t blow it: follow us on Twitter to catch the new playlists as they’re sent out on Mondays and Thursdays, or head here to check out an archive of all the playlists mentioned above and many more.
