Metal
Here you'll find album histories, birthdays, and anniversaries connected to the artists who built metal and its branches, along with vinyl reissue news as titles reappear. Metal has a particularly active underground pressing culture: independent labels regularly issue small runs in colored or splatter vinyl, and older catalog titles get reworked into box sets and remasters aimed at longtime fans rather than casual listeners. The stories here follow how specific records came together — band lineups, studio choices, the scenes around them — and note when a reissue gives an older album a reason to be discussed again.
202 STORIES
How Ozzy Osbourne Turned His Own Demons Into a Grammy
Four days after Ordinary Man dropped, Ozzy Osbourne was back in the studio with Andrew Watt. Patient Number 9 became his longest solo album and a Grammy winner.
· 4 min read
Jethro Tull's Minstrel in the Gallery: A Studio on Wheels
A band with a decade of road-worn muscle retreated not to some pastoral English manor, but to a Mediterranean tax haven, hauling a custom-built recording truck …
· 4 min read
When Motörhead Became a Quartet and Lost a Label
Six songs for a film soundtrack, a drummer who walked out three years earlier suddenly back behind the kit, and a bandleader moonlighting as a character called …
· 4 min read
Stratovarius: The Album That Survived a Breakdown
Stratovarius released their self-titled eleventh album in September 2005 after a nervous breakdown nearly ended the band. Guitarist Timo Tolkki later disavowed the record he wrote entirely.
· 5 min read
Mike Wengren: The Drummer Who Turned Silence Into a Grammy Nod
Mike Wengren spent over three decades as the rhythmic backbone of Disturbed. A Simon & Garfunkel cover on 2015's 'Immortalized' earned the band a Grammy nomination.
· 4 min read
How Audioslave Made Their Final Album a Funk-Soul Reckoning
Audioslave closed their studio career with September 2006's Revelations. Tom Morello described the sound as Led Zeppelin meeting Earth, Wind & Fire.
· 5 min read
Gary Wright: The Synth Dream That Never Faded
Gary Wright spent a lifetime refusing to be just one thing, but the paradox of his career is that one shimmering track from 1975 ultimately defined him.
· 4 min read
The Book of Souls: When Iron Maiden’s Longest Album Had to Wait
A double album running over 92 minutes, yet its release wasn’t delayed by creative indecision — it was sidelined by a cancer diagnosis. Eleven years ago, on Sep…
· 4 min read
How a London Club Gig Became Dream Theater's First Live Document
In April 1993, Dream Theater recorded their first official live album at London's Marquee club. The document later became as famous for its omissions as its inclusions.
· 4 min read
Lucidity: The Studio Project That Refused to Be One
Delain's debut Lucidity was conceived as a one-off studio project by Martijn Westerholt, but its chart success forced the band into existence.
· 5 min read
System of a Down's Toxicity at 25: Sitar, Prison Cells
System of a Down's Toxicity turns 25 this September. A seven-times platinum album that topped the Billboard 200 with sitar drones, banjo lines, and lyrics about CIA operations and prison overcrowding.
· 4 min read
How Blackie Lawless Walked Away from His Own Anthem
Blackie Lawless, the architect of W.A.S.P.'s shock rock empire, turned seventy today, having spent the back half of his life systematically dismantling the monster he created.
· 5 min read
Roll the Bones: The Rush Album That Dared to Rap
Rush's fourteenth album Roll the Bones arrived on September 3, 1991. It cracked the Billboard top five and went platinum despite a rap interlude no sensible band would attempt.
· 3 min read
42 Years Later, an Iron Maiden Album Broke a Dave Murray Streak
When the letters 'WOTW' turned up on a European tour poster in April 2021, Iron Maiden fans went straight to work. No press release, no official word — just thr…
· 4 min read
Lordi: The Man Without a Mask, the Band Without a Face
Before the masks and Eurovision, Tomi Putaansuu shot a bare-faced video for his 1993 demo Napalm Market — the only time the public would see him that way.
· 4 min read
Where Death Wore a Party Hat
A nude figure rendered in early-2000s CGI, mid-cavort, frozen forever on the cover of an Iron Maiden album. The decision so baffled the artist who painted the r…
· 3 min read
Sepultura: How Chaos A.D. Changed Metal
Thirty-three years ago, on September 2, 1993, Sepultura released Chaos A.D. — the album where the Brazilians deliberately walked away from the thrash metal orthodoxy they had helped define.
· 5 min read
Gene Simmons: The Demon, the Coffin, and the Brand
Born Chaim Witz in Haifa in 1949, Gene Simmons turned a New York glam-scene misfire into a global commercial juggernaut. The music itself was only half the product.
· 5 min read
Rob Halford: A Voice That Could Shatter Glass
Rob Halford joined Judas Priest in 1973 and turned a rockabilly cover into a declaration of war on the limits of the human voice.
· 5 min read
Layne Staley's 1967 Birth and the Heaviest Grunge Record
Born on August 22, 1967, Layne Staley became the voice of Alice in Chains, whose album Dirt remains one of the heaviest works in their catalog.
· 4 min read
Layne Staley: The Darkest Voice of Seattle's Grief
Layne Staley fronted Alice in Chains, the band that dragged grunge into the shadows, and died alone in his Seattle apartment in 2002 at the age of 34.
· 4 min read
Vernon Reid: The Dissonance That Built a Coalition
A guitarist shredding a solo for Public Enemy while simultaneously channeling the free-jazz chaos of Ornette Coleman. That single sentence sounds like a glitch …
· 4 min read
Toxicity: The Raw Sessions Behind System of a Down's Breakthrough
System of a Down's Toxicity debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2001, moving over 220,000 copies in its first week. The album emerged from raw sessions at Cello Studios.
· 4 min read
Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak: The Twin-Guitar Album That Broke America
A black Irishman fronting a hard rock band in the mid-1970s was almost unthinkable, yet Phil Lynott turned that identity into Thin Lizzy's sharpest weapon. Born…
· 4 min read