Talk:Heavy metal genres

Heavy metal genres is within the scope of the Music genres task force of the Music project, a user driven attempt to clean up and standardize music genre articles on Wikipedia. Please visit the task force guidelines page for ideas on how to structure a genre article and help us assess and improve genre articles to good article status.Music/Music genres task forceWikipedia:WikiProject Music/Music genres task forceTemplate:WikiProject Music/Music genres task forcemusic genre

Metal

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Metal, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of heavy metal music on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.MetalWikipedia:WikiProject MetalTemplate:WikiProject MetalHeavy Metal

Archives

Archive 1	Archive 2	Archive 3
Archive 4

This page has archives. Sections older than 90 days may be automatically archived by when more than 5 sections are present.

Add nu Metalcore and progressive Metalcore

As Wikipedia now has a pages on these subgenres they should be added to the subgenre page as derivatives of metalcore — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.144.21.58 (talk) 18:32, 13 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nu metalcore can’t be added; it links to a section in the Nu Metal article. However, progressive metalcore does have its own Wikipedia article, so I might consider adding it to this list. KevinML (talk) 00:13, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Nevermind, someone already added nu metalcore KevinML (talk) 00:17, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

"Traditional heavy metal"???

To refer to the origin bands like Sabbath / Zep / Deep Purple etc. etc. as "traditional" sets a bad historical revisionist precedent. All these origin bands are different from each other as is, and at present (2019) the term "traditional metal" is not in common use at all. Can we avoid historical revisionism infecting metal? Most refer to the original bands as "classic" metal. Maybe "foundational" makes more sense, but even that's a stretch, as the foundations don't cleanly begin with the mid-to-late 1960s hard blues. ARobbo (talk) 23:06 30 December 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.203.184.3 (talk)

New Metalcore Subgenre

I added “Progressive metalcore” to metalcore subgenres.” KevinML (talk) 00:30, 16 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Metalcore

When reading through this page I noticed it stated that metalcore is a genre consisting of hardcore and heavy metal. In my opinion this is wrong, metalcore is a fusion genre consisting of hardcore and extreme metal. That is a big difference. Thrash is a amalgamation of hardcore and heavy metal, metalcore simply isn’t. There are a lot of elements of extreme metal present in metalcore.

I would like the correct information to be written here. JinxTheFluffyFox (talk) 18:25, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

wrong link

the link for Acid King is wrong. It goes to the Murderer instead of the band. 50.52.121.241 (talk) 04:21, 14 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Heavy metal" should not be used as the catch-all term for metal music

The use of "heavy metal" as a general descriptor for all styles of metal music is historical and antiquated and does not represent current usage by fans, scholars, or critics. To quote from Lewis Kennedy's 2018 dissertation Functions of Genre in Metal and Hardcore Music:

"Multiple academic and non-academic texts on metal utilise the term ‘heavy metal’ (e.g. Weinstein 1991; Walser 1993; Christe 2003; Berelian 2005), but my preference for simply ‘metal’ is twofold. First, heavy metal does not refer to all forms of metal music – both Kahn-Harris (2007) and Phillipov (2012) make distinctions between ‘heavy metal’ and ‘extreme metal’ – and is instead commonly employed in reference to specific forms of metal, especially prominent prior to the mid-1980s. Second, and related, the use of metal as a catchall for various diverse genres with some relation to earlier heavy metal is widespread within both academic and non-academic discourse. Reflected in the name of the International Society of Metal Music Studies, as well as in the names of websites like Metal Sucks and Metal Archives, metal is accepted as a general term."

Kennedy, Lewis F. “Functions of Genre in Metal and Hardcore Music.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2018.

The use of metal as the accepted umbrella term for the genre is replicated across contemporary metal discourse, including academic and non-academic writing and resources, in use by bands and labels, and the default for almost any fan discussion of metal that you can find online (the largest metal community on Reddit is tellingly called r/Metal). Using heavy metal as the catch-all genre term is outdated to the point of being flatly wrong, and muddies metal discourse by associating genres like death metal and black metal with the heavy metal umbrella that extreme metal very intentionally stylistically divorced itself from. The heavy metal lineage continues in styles like traditional doom and power metal, and to not make this distinction misunderstands contemporary terminology usage and important genre categories based on normative genre characteristics and relationships to the music characteristics of traditional heavy metal music.

To summarize: the accepted preferred term among fans, critics, bands, labels, scholars, and non-academic writers is "metal" or "metal music". "Heavy metal" occupies the same tier as "extreme metal" – they both fall under the umbrella term metal and each is an umbrella term containing a grouping of more specific genres. "Metal" and "heavy metal" are not equivalent terms, and treating them as such goes against accepted modern word use across nearly the entirety of metal. 2601:249:8280:4010:E180:F668:12C4:C374 (talk) 17:26, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]