Metal Heads of DoomWorld, what was your introduction to metal?

[Graf Zahl]

Helloween - Keeper of the Seven Keys - Parts 1+2. Still some of the most amazing albums ever made. :)

 

[Uncle 80]

in '88, when Europe's "Final countdown" was released, my friend's cool dad played it for us - that was the beginning. A couple years later, my 2 years older other friend gave me a bunch of maiden tapes. Oh, and G'n'R was all the rage among classmates back in '91 when Use Your Illusion I was released. Then we heard Arise by Sepultura a year later... 

Edited September 28, 2021 by Uncle 80

[ax34]

I began listening to metal from video game music: Duke Nukem 3D intro, Hard Truck OST by Ария, demo song from Blood setup.exe, music from Twisted Metal...

But long before i already listened to hard rock: Scorpions, Queen, Europe, some rock music from anime/cartoons...

Edited September 28, 2021 by ax34

[SilentD00mer]

Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, I guess. Maybe I listened some power metal at that time too(my memory fails).

[ludicrous_peridot]

I saw a friend at school started wearing Helloween and Metallica t-shirts. So I got interested and asked him which of their albums I should listen to.

Oh no you shouldn't, he said. Have these instead. And fetched me some Blind Guardian and Rage tapes.

Apparently at that time he just couldn't get a t-shirt of his real favourite band.

 

I was indeed very much impressed with Imaginations from the Other Side and End of all Days albums, became my long time favorites.

Strangely, classic Metal bands never made such a great impression on me, so I never subsequently turned to Sabbath or Metallica. Go figure :)

 

[xdude_gamer]

Metallica's "Fuel" playing on the radio back in the early-2010s.

[The BMFG]

My dad got me into metal and rock alot

[prfunky]

Back when I was a kid, AC-DC and Black Sabbath. By 8th grade, Raven, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. By high school, Anvil, Accept, Motley Crue (and yes, their first 2 albums were actually good!). As a young adult got into Anthrax and my girlfriend at the time turned me into a Slayer fan.

[smeghammer]

This:

 

 

This:

 

and - oddly, this:

 

 

Yeah, old skool and proud

Edited October 30, 2021 by smeghammer

[prfunky]

Meh, still pretty good as old guys...

 

 

[prfunky]

 

[Gangstalker]

Funnily enough, Doom was what got me into Metal.

 

It's a very intricate story. First I heard about John Romero's SIGIL thing, and how this guy named Buckethead did a soundtrack for it. I checked out the "Romero One Mind Any Weapon" track, thought it was awesome, and went down the rabbit hole, finding bands like Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, Pantera, among others.

[sptz33]

So during 2016 I was kinda obsessed with watching crash compilations based on a racing sim called NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, and one of the videos had featured 2 songs fused into one, taken from the Justin Lowe's demo recordings. Justin was a member of After the Burial, so I checked out the band's first album Forging a Future Self and that shit was hitting hard! That record blew my mind away, at the time for me it was the heaviest shit in the world, I was still in high school at the time, so my young mind was only having a taste of what heavy music was. That band is still great actually, I listened to most of their records and they still hold up, I could never find a metalcore band that would top them, that was my number one band. 

 

Few years later, I am now just obsessed with grindcore and death metal. These days I have kinda lost that sense of heaviness, that dopamine from music if you will, but there are still songs that get my head banging and help to get through the day. 

 

[TenenteZashu]

8 hours ago, Gangstalker said:

Funnily enough, Doom was what got me into Metal.

 

It's a very intricate story. First I heard about John Romero's SIGIL thing, and how this guy named Buckethead did a soundtrack for it. I checked out the "Romero One Mind Any Weapon" track, thought it was awesome, and went down the rabbit hole, finding bands like Megadeth, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, Pantera, among others.

Yeah Buckethead is pretty great, by far one of my favorite musicians

[Sokoro]

On 9/28/2021 at 9:18 AM, Endless said:

As for videogame music, I think the first piece of ''metal'' music I heard was in the Unreal Tournament 2004 soundtrack. It's more of a mixture of metal with electronic but it is badass.

 

 

Oh no, that music 2:05:00 or that *thing* at 2:07:20... more music like this! Some really good ONS music. Just give it straight into my veins! I don't regret playing this game for thousands of hours. Thanks UT2004 for existing! (BRB going to play it right now)

[DSC]

I once made a friend with this pretty cool guy, who happened to be quite the big metalhead. At the time I still had all the common prejudices and poorly informed opinions about the genre, but he made me genuinely incredibly curious and willing to learn more. Afterwards, I don't remember exactly if I began researching guitar videos on YouTube or if came out of nowhere, but YT recommended me the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwxnM4d8hiY

When it reached the part where he plays The Trooper, my mind right then just imploded in and on itself. Been a fan ever since.

 

And just one more thing... It seems the video is only around 3 years old, which means thats also the time I've been a metalhead. Its so weird, it feels like I've been listening for so much longer...

[Martin Howe]

Nice to see a lot of the younger members got into metal because of Doom :) I'm old-skool, same as smeghammer; was at high school from 1976 to 1981 and always liked the heavier or odd pop music, then somebody bought Black Sabbath to school. But what really started it was someone brought in Rainbow on Stage on cassette tape to school in our last year and Man on the Silver Mountain live blew me away - THIS was the kind of music I'd been waiting for all my life without knowing it actually existed. So blame Richie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio :) 

 

Of course like with drugs  (allegedly) you start with the soft stuff and move up; next it was Ozzy Osbourne, Hawkwind (who were quite 'metallic' in the mid 1980s), Agent Steel, Overkill, and of course Motörhead.

 

Protip for the youngsters: if you want to get to know the stuff your dad or grandad listened to, go to YouTube. In 2015 I was looking for a very old thrash metal song called Merciless Insanity by a band called Kasjurol who released some demos and then disappeared, heard them on the Friday Night Rock Show than ran in the UK until the early 90s and it had been an earworm in my head for literally decades. Having realised YT was full or people uploading albums, I went looking for it there. Found it, but also an inexhaustible supply of not just old-skool thrash and metal bands I didn't know about / appreciate when younger, but loads of new-skool bands, some doing modern takes on old-skool stuff, some doing new genres such as crossover or party thrash (e.g., Municipal Waste, Mindtaker) or their own thing (Toxic Holocaust, Hellripper). Plus I've discovered Venom! It's a real rabbit-hole out there, worse than TV Tropes :) Oh, and Hail Satanus (this is Doom after all) :p

Edited September 29, 2021 by Martin Howe

[Koko Ricky]

It started out pretty gradually. I heard a lot of classic rock during my many childhood car rides (thanks dad!), and found the more aggressive and energetic bands--Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Jimmi Hendrix, Styx, Van Halen, etc.--to be the most appealing.

 

Enter middle school, circa 1997. I started jamming the hard rock station, and was instantly drawn to the heavy hitters: Pantera, White Zombie, Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath and solo Ozzy, Metallica, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and unfortunately, a fair bit of hair metal. 

 

So by 1999, during my freshman year in high school, I was naturally drawn to anything heavy, but was still only familiar with the most popular examples. One day, I skipped several evolutionary steps when a friend introduced me to Devourment, a local brutal/slam death metal band. The album he showed me, "Molesting the Decapitated," featured a photo of a bloated headless cadaver, with the liner notes being similarly visceral, depicting penis torture of some sort. Musically, between the inhuman growls, extreme distortion and caveman stomp riffs, I was instantly infatuated. 

 

This same friend then turned me on to a community radio station that had a few extreme metal formats throughout the week, and from there I filled in the gaps. Slowly, I made my way to black, speed, thrash, power, grind, doom, etc., and through the Internet filled in additional blanks such as industrial, avant garde and ambient metal. So it's at this time that I got into bands that stuck with me to this day: Angelcorpse, Darkthrone, Pentagram, Dying Fetus, Morbid Angel, Autopsy, Slayer, Exodus, Rigor Mortis, Napalm Death, Bathory, Cannibal Corpse, Mr. Bungle, Ministry, Angel Witch, Celtic Frost, Nunslaughter, Satyricon, Motorhead, and many others. 

 

I'm a bit burnt out by metal these days as many of the artists are highly derivative, often very self-knowingly. Then you have bands that needlessly push extremes, such as tuning to double drop D or playing at 300bpm, with neither technique yielding interesting results. At this point I just want strong songwriting that eschews cheesy pop arrangements/vocals, but still has solid, memorable ideas. Sadly such criteria excludes the majority of contemporary releases.

 

Edited September 29, 2021 by Koko Ricky

[hybridial]

1 hour ago, Koko Ricky said:

At this point I just want strong songwriting that eschews cheesy pop arrangements/vocals, but still has solid, memorable ideas. Sadly such criteria excludes the majority of contemporary releases.

 

I think I can identify with this attitude to a degree with other mediums but I just decided, I will look. I will see what I can find, and I will cherish what I find to be up to the standard I'm looking for. Flipping things around and trying to be more positive.

 

I don't know how compatible our tastes are though so I don't really know if I could make any suggestions. I guess I could say I liked One Rode to Asa Bay quite a bit when I heard it? I do want to say Be'lakor, just because, I really haven't heard anything else quite like them, and they're definitely close to the top level for me. 

[Dusty_Rhodes]

On 9/28/2021 at 2:29 AM, BaileyTW said:

Guess I'm showing my age with this one, but Guitar Hero was mostly my introduction to metal. Specifically Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock. No one around really listened to that type of music, so when I was younger games were my only exposure to metal and metal-adjacent music.

You really shouldn't be worried about showing your age on a forum started in 1999 for a nearly thirty year old game. Don't worry, I'm old too hahaha

[Koko Ricky]

1 hour ago, hybridial said:

 

I think I can identify with this attitude to a degree with other mediums but I just decided, I will look. I will see what I can find, and I will cherish what I find to be up to the standard I'm looking for. Flipping things around and trying to be more positive.

 

I don't know how compatible our tastes are though so I don't really know if I could make any suggestions. I guess I could say I liked One Rode to Asa Bay quite a bit when I heard it? I do want to say Be'lakor, just because, I really haven't heard anything else quite like them, and they're definitely close to the top level for me. 

I've searched for new bands a number of times and so far Black Curse has been one of the few that has stuck with me. A kind of black/death/grind hybrid in the vain of Revenge, Beherit, Blasphemy, Axis of Advance, etc. Very noisy and heavy, extremely brooding and dark stuff. It manages to be interesting without being overly dramatic.

[prfunky]

 

[Decay]

For me it was liking Rush's early works. Wanting stuff that was more like Working Man and Bastille Day in terms of pacing/distortion effects, my friend then handed me a copy of Iron Maiden's Best of the Beast and it took off from there.

[leejacksonaudio]

I'm not exactly a true metalhead, per se, but I play one in video game music. :)  Nevertheless, my first exposure of any kind was back in the late 60s, when I saw (yes, saw) the cover to a Led Zeppelin album in one of my maternal uncle's record collections. I have no idea how it sounded, but it kind of shocked me, since I was only about 5 or 6 years old and wasn't used to seeing such artwork on a record cover. That should tell you something about the sheltered life I had in my early days.

[Azuris]

Hard to say.

 

The same as it was with Techno, Classic and everything else:

Video Games, Movies and a better musical Diversity on TV and Radio in the 90s :P

 

 

[Megalyth]

6 hours ago, leejacksonaudio said:

I'm not exactly a true metalhead

 

That term is a borderline insult in my opinion, so don't feel too badly about it. I'm no metal head either, I just enjoy music.

[hybridial]

2 minutes ago, Megalyth said:

That term is a borderline insult in my opinion

 

It really depends on who's saying it, I don't think the OP meant any insult by it.

 

But yeah, I do only regularly listen to metal, but I still would not call myself that. I mean I "like" a lot of music, and this is most apparent in liking the soundtracks of a lot of games that don't have metal soundtracks, but to be in my folder of band music I have to "love" what you're doing and that for me is just very specific. 

[Megalyth]

2 minutes ago, hybridial said:

 

It really depends on who's saying it, I don't think the OP meant any insult by it.

 

Yeah I wasn't assuming that, just remarking on the behavior of "true" metal heads that I've interacted with over the past 20-odd years.

[Phobus]

Doom, Doom II, Duke3D and Quake II would've been the main introductions to "metal-style" background music in games (obvious Quake II way more so, but the MIDI music of the earlier games was a good enough start), which would've fertilised my mind for the Need for Speed Underground soundtrack to then plant the seeds. The Only (by Static-X), Broken Promises (by Element Eighty), Invisible (by Hotwire), (To Hell We) Ride (by Lostprophets), Out of Control (by Rancid) and And The Hero Will Drown (by Story of the Year) are the ones that stuck with me, providing a range of rock and metal to get me started. Not long after that I was introduced to Slipknot (Volume 3), Metallica (Ride the Lightning) and Linkin Park (Meteora, shortly followed by Hybrid Theory) by my brother. Evanescence had a breakthrough radio hit in the UK with Bring Me To Life around the same time, too. After that I started seeking out bands like what I knew, more games had real music soundtracks (culminating the Guitar Hero series, for me) and my brother kept introducing me to random stuff he was getting into, as did an older cousin who was like a guru of geek culture for me back then. Now we're here and something silly like half of the shirts I own are black, and I'm still picking up the odd song from stuff like the Forza Horizon games.

 

The more music I hear, the more I like, but I'm fairly heavily biased to rock and metal still. Cheers, id software!

Edited September 30, 2021 by Phobus

[ChopBlock223]

Gee, it's so long ago I can't remember. I think I had seen Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Offspring on MTV, and I really liked them, it made me very receptive to more rock music and heavy guitar.

 

Eventually my brother showed me a bunch of songs he downloaded, Princes Of The Universe (which I had heard in Highlander), as well as some stuff by Ozzy Osbourne (Shot In The Dark and Iron Man maybe), also stuff by Alice Cooper, School's Out rang particularly well with my little heart. I'd get to hear tracks from the Brutal Planet album some time later, and it got me hooked hard on Alice Cooper's music (though I wouldn't really go and explore his full discography until much later, and I would love that too). I'm a huge fan of his music to this day, I think he's an incredible singer and songwriter, who writes incredible lyrics, and he has a real wide and varied range, starting in more conventional rock and hippie rock, then going into hard rock and heavy metal, even experimenting (very successfully) with industrial metal in the 2000s. His storytelling in the lyrics is something I particularly love.

 

Another big part of my taste in metal would be in my teens when I went to discover the music which Doom was inspired by, Alice In Chain's Dirt album resonated particularly well with me in my later teens, when I was such a miserable sadsack full of rage and self-loathing.

I'm not in that bad place these days, but still I'll listen to that album and just let the negative emotions of it envelop me, because it reminds me how bad it was, and I know it's not like that now, so it makes me feel good. But also it's a sick album with gnarly music which is cool as hell.