Metallica

This coming Friday, a new film adaptation of Stephen King’s iconic and massive horror novel ‘IT’ will be released in American cinemas. Will it be good? King does not have the best history with cinema. The beloved miniseries based upon the novel, starring Tim Curry as the shapeshifting clown monster Pennywise, does not hold up,…

We look at some of the best metal songs of all time… that have never been performed live.

Our Neill Jameson revisits Metallica’s controversial self-titled album.

In which we revisit …And Justice for All and rank the songs from worst to best. Justice is done.

What are the Top 100 metal tours of all time? Find out in Decibel‘s new limited edition special issue of 100% previously-unprinted content. 

There’s more than a little similarity between Metallica’s new album cover and a classic Crowbar album cover; we caught up with one of the guys who worked on the Metallica cover to find out what’s going on here.

Waldo pecks on Metallica‘s Hardwired… To Self-Destruct.

Metallica return to the cover of Decibel for the first time in eight years. Get your copy now. 

Chris McInroy brought a little shred, gurgle, n’ grind to this year’s Fantastic Fest with his relentlessly awesome, gore-drenched love letter to the decimating power of riffage, Death Metal. The short film is now tearing its way through a huge number of subsequent festivals and considering both its Deci-worthy subject matter overlap and the season, we thought we’d reach out to the director to see if he’d be down to summon up a Death Metal playlist.

After 21 years of housing some of the finest metal acts known to mankind, British label Music For Nations closed shop in 2004. The label was folded in Sony Entertainment’s Zomba Record Group and mothballed until last year when Sony rekindled the legendary label’s fire.  So, we’re celebrating with an essential Top 10. 

Metallica’s Load reconsidered 20 years later.

One of the best things about heavy metal is the sense of community it fosters: we’re all in this together because no one else fucking cares. So when an unexpected metalhead pops up in daily life, it’s always a cool feeling. Sometimes it’s that weird guy at work who never says a word to anyone but comes in one Friday wearing a Stargazer shirt…and sometimes it’s an MLB All-Star relief pitcher with more than 200 career strikeouts and a beard with its own zip code.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled headbanging to bring you an exciting revelation. This year, on Saturday, April 18–known to the western world as “Record Store Day”–American thrash metal legends Metallica will reissue their demo, No Life ‘Til Leather. What’s more, the demo will be reissued on its original format, a limited-edition cassette! Metallica’s own label,…

Every metalhead has a few skeletons in their respective closet. And by skeletons, we mean musical skeletons not anything particularly untoward or, possibly, illegal. Growing up first on pop music, then on cock rock, and then with thrash, death, black, and every fucking sub-genre (and sub-sub-genre) offshoot, it’s pretty easy to see and hear where…

5. Sabbat Brit thrashers Sabbat were among a select few to come from the island to have made a genuine impact. To this very day, Dreamweaver remains singular. The group’s logo also has similar import. Like most thrash metal logos, it’s readable at a distance yet it has an edge to it. Each letter in…

After an extended layoff Justin Trosper of the late, much-mourned noisy post-hardcore heroes Unwound has returned with an excellent infectious-if-still-decidedly-off-kilter outfit of musical subversion, Survival Knife. Our Deci-antennae really started vibrating, however, when Trosper cited Enslaved and Opeth, among other extreme metallers, as influences for his new venture in a great interview over at Stereo…

In 2014, I resolve to: Descant the insalubrious. Yoko Ono Chimaira. Stop smashing hammer faces. Train my army of attack hamsters. Look into whether or not goat sacrifice requires a permit. Resist your touch of evil. Follow Darkthrone on tour. Convince Albert to do a Hall Of Fame on Nightwish’s Wishmaster. Transcribe Obituary lyrics. Watch…

Longtime readers are well aware that the editor in chief of this magazine is a Phillies lifer, whereas the managing editor (yours truly) is a Mets masochist. This year, both our beloved clubs gobbled bags of dicks, so we’re 100% backing the (yet again) ingeniously assembled Oakland A’s through October. For our annual baseball preview…

We remember the folks who were around when we started listening to metal. One of the people I have a vivid memory of is my old friend Robert Dyer: a wild haired guitar aficionado that sat next to me in many a math class during our four years at a parochial prep school. Robert often…

As much as I swore I was never going to do a blog post about goddamn Metallica, when Bazillion Point Books contacted me about doing a spread celebrating the 30th anniversary of Cliff Burton’s first show with Metallica (March 5, 1983, for those of you who aren’t so good with math) – featuring actual photographs…

Toronto rock journalist Brent Jensen’s No Sleep ‘Til Sudbury is a smart, sweet memoir of the joys and travails of growing up metal in tiny Espanola, Ontario — …A Fine Paper Town, as the welcome sign notes — weaving a portrait of youthful discovery/rebellion into a larger macro story of metal’s mid-eighties coming-of-age moment. It’s…

All of a sudden thrash’s heyday—it’s nascence—has inspired a bunch of books. Bazillion Points of Light’s Murder in the Front Row provided a photographic document of the California scene that started in L.A. with Metallica and Slayer and then blossomed into something amazing in the Bay Area shortly thereafter. Now UK author Neil Daniels offers…

Sure, ripping the annual Grammy nominations (and then later the inevitable head-scratching winner, see above) is like shooting fish in a barrel, but we must point out that to be so utterly clueless about a major part of the music business (metal) for so long really does take some effort. At this point we can’t…

Here’s a band there’s got to be a million tattoos for. Unfortunately, 99% of them are those shitty little ninja stars, and the second most popular idea is to simply get the name in the classic font. Those are both boring ideas. The word is a little cool, just cause it usually comes out like…

That’s right, folks, our Collector’s Edition Thrash Metal Hall of Fame issue is back from the printers and available—right now—to buy from the Decibel webstore and a select few indie record stores. After hopefully violating innumerate health and safety regulations to print the third of Decibel’s gnarly Hall of Fame Collector’s Editions in Vic Rattlehead’s…

I’m not usually someone to post a jokey video in place of a verbose, self-important rant against something inconsequential, but this is different. When some future civilization unearths the only iPod to ever contain the entire 90 minutes of Lulu, they will be as baffled and speechless as we are today. No one, I doubt…

Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of Cliff Burton’s death. Metallica were traveling through Sweden on the Damage Inc. tour in support of Master of Puppets, when the band’s bus crashed just outside Ljungby, killing Burton. He was 24. Sometimes it’s easy—perfectly natural, too—to over-egg it and go nuts when evaluating the dead’s music or art….

If metal was a mother, beer would replace breast milk. The folks at esteemed N.Y.C. drinking establishment Idle Hands Bar in the fragrant East Village neighborhood know this very well. (Do your beer gut a favor, and follow them @IdleHandsBar.) They’re teaming up with the brewmasters at Harpoon and Speakeasy to bring you Learning to…

If you’re a Decibel subscriber, issue #82 [Scott Ian cartoon cover] should be arriving via angry postman shortly. In this month’s cover, longtime dude’s dude Nick Green detailed in fantastic fashion the link between comics and extreme music. With a (spoiler alert!) fold-out cover illustrator by Henry and Glenn inklord Tom Neely, issue #82 boldly…

How did you get past the personal and professional challenges that faced you while writing and recording Black Rivers Flow?Alex Lackner: With everything that was being thrown at us during the process of making this record many would seem to fail. We didn’t even allow that to be an option. To start with, the whole…