i'm not that much of a lyric person. it's a bonus if they're great.

however, in some cases like with the band woods of ypres, i find them hard to listen to because the lyrics are seriously off-putting.

I think this is big part in why a lot of people don't take the time to read the lyrics and another thing is that more people are doing other things while listening to music these days.

white zombie lyrics are hilarious and make no sense

I don't really listen to lyrics in any music, except rap.

I would only read lyrics because I really like the song(s) and/or I am going to be covering that song later for one of my bands.

Well that's not a problem but it does tell me a lot more why you dislike the more artistic and proggy style of the new Hibria...

I like good lyrics, the only reason I won't read 'em is like someone said, too busy a lot of the time. But some of my favorite lyrics are from Slough Feg, Savatage and Metal Church.

Personally, I'm not too concerned about the lyrics. Occasionally I'll flip through the lyrics booklet when I get this impulse of curiosity

And if I was concerned about the lyrical content I would not listen to a band like Temnozor'. For 2 reasons: 1. The lyrics are in a language that I unfortunately don't speak or understand fluently, and 2: I don't agree with the ideological stance of the lyrics, and I'm sure most people here are aware of what that stance is

I used to be really into lyrics and frequently let them affect my judgment towards a particular song/album. Nowadays, I don't listen to them much though I don't mind thinking about them on occasion. Of course, that probably has something to do with why I haven't consistently written lyrics since my junior year of college...

Only rarely do I really listen to the lyrics, let alone read them. When I was new to metal I sometimes read some lyrics by bands such as Slayer and Cannibal Corpse, but I find that most bands' lyrics are cheesy as fuck or just plain lame so I don't bother reading them.

I do pay quite a lot of attention to the lyrics, as I think they're an important part in the whole; I don't like the music I listen to be just a recollection of cool sounding riffs, but to have a theme, an idea, and to evolve and develop around it.

That been said, I do have however some albums I like with shitty lyrics, but personally I find it drags down the album a bit, i.e. Dance of December Souls, musically it's amazing, but the lyrics are really, really lame, both in theme and writing, and that sucks.
Such exceptions exist however only if the music is really that good, an album that's somewhat mediocre or barely over average with crappy lyrics goes straight to the garbage bin.

On the matter of growled/shrieked vocals, after several years of both listening to and singing in that style I got used and most of the time I understand what's being sung (as long as the singer has a good diction) without having to read the lyrics. There are exceptions of course, as in Demilich, where without the booklet I would have missed all that awesome bizarre scifi.

Lyrics are quite important to me, though I do not always focus on lyrics. I like many bands that have lyrics in languages I do not understand. I someone times pay attention to lyrics and I sometimes don't.

Yes, I do especially if it's DEATH/thrash/black.
I don't know why I'm so captivated at some dark lyrics.

I don't know if you do this, but i put a special attention to lyrics depending on the genre, (a reason i don't look the lyrics for many bands of Rock & Roll ) For instance: Glam, (sometimes) Heavy, Power and Folk stuff.

When I listen to a new band for the first time, I'd ignore the lyrics for awhile because I want to concentrate on the overall music because when I buy a new CD and start listening to an album while reading the lyrics, it sort of ruins the experience. After I get used to the sound especially in Power Metal, I'd love to read the lyrics just sing-along because then it would be fun and that goes for everything.

Well, almost everything. In Black Metal, I do love the music... quite a lot quite frankly but 90% of Satanic lyrics come out pretty stupid because once a 43908309583094 bands have written the same damn lyrics about Satan comes out of hell, Satan destroys humanity, Satan destroy the Heavens and anyone up there, Satan destroys his followers just for good measure, and Satan lives happily ever after or does he? (Black Metal lyrics plothole... if Satan does destroy everything, his life would be boring afterwards... he pretty much destroyed everything and he'll sit on his throne doing absolutely nothing, right?) Some bands try to throw in big words just to sound "intelligent". Other than lyrical obnoxiousness, Black Metal music is great. But hey, cheesy is cheesy and a lot of it can be enjoyable.

So, to me... music before lyrics... great lyrics is a bonus.

When it comes to females vocalists singing beautifully in power metal: Always
Bands with bm rasps, shrieks/ dm grunts etc : Meh, depends on how curious I am about the band/song
Bands that do gutterals: Why in the world...

Always. No matter what kind of music it is, even if I can't follow the vocals exactly, I read the lyrics.

I'll read the lyrics every now and then. Some black metal stuff, especially nature themed lyrics, and anti-religious lyrics that actually have an intelligent meaning. Not just screaming about satan, because that got boring pretty quickly.
A few bands that have lyrics I actually read are Agalloch, Primordial, and Wolves in the Throne Room. Also Nile, Cryptopsy(old) and Death(later).

I think lyrics are important, but an awesome riff will always make bad lyrics an after thought, to me anyway.

In extreme metal, lyrics tend to work as a mere explanation or verbal manifestation of the message of a song, and only rarely for the sake of memorable, anthemic lines (Immolation, Morbid Angel...). Dan Greening is a brilliant lyricist, and excels in writing of sinister subjects in a thoughful way, avoiding the ham-fisted approach of so many death metal lyricists. Songs like Slit Your Guts and Lichmistress truly impressed me in that they absolutely break the stereotype of death metal lyrics even though the subject matter is the same old.

His style is in as perfect synergy with his vocal style as there can be. Anthemic lines would go to waste when all you can make out from his growling is BRUUAARG GRUHAHA ARHAHA GRAH, or the occasional shrill scream that supposedly delivers a line.

I like lyrics, mostly stuff that is ... poetic and ... schizophrenic. I can't explain it better.
Silencer is a good example.

Well I'm glad you could all be a part of the Waking The Cadaver hating bandwagon.

This.

yes it's the same for me. mainstream music doesn't have the subject matter that metal does. and it also doesn't interest me. the pop music, rap, R&B, etc is so boring and uninspired to me that whenever i hear it, it's like someone is jabbing a knife into my skull.
i used to listen to mainstream music but i got bored of it after a few years. i actually stumbled across metal by accident. the first song i heard, well actually only part of it, was Zero Signal by Fear Factory, it was on the intro of Carmageddon and since that day i have listened to pretty much nothing but metal. and i am glad that i found metal. it is the ONLY music that touches my soul.


yes ITA with you there. i enjoy it most when i am moved by good song lyrics or when i see/feel something from a different perspective.


i haven't heard that many female vocalists in power metal, goth/industrial metal or whichever other sub-genre of metal they do but i do enjoy it when i do. the vocalist in Nightwish for example. i found it a bit weird at first, but over time it grew on me and i learned to appreciate another side of metal. Kittie are also another band that piqued my interest the first time i heard them. though i find it difficult to understand their lyrics i still enjoy the music none the less. and recently having discovered Art in Exile, i haven't heard anything like it before and i am going to be exploring their style of music. can anyone recommend some Dark/Gothic Metal?

Only if they're good. If not I just treat the vocals as just another instrument.

First and foremost, I'm into the music (vocal work included).

If I really like the music, if I listen to it enough times, I'm gonna start paying attention to the overall themes, the lyrics. I also find that some singers have a real skill at making you pay attention to the lyrics thanks to intonation, phrasing and the emotion they put into their singing. The wrong delivery can make interesting lyrics fall flat or even make them sillier than intended. Sometimes I regret paying attention to what is actually being said, because great lyricists aren't a dime a dozen and I find most lyrics pretty fucking stupid.

One exception is that I'm not gonna give a shit about lyrics if I can't understand the singer. So even if an extreme growler was the new Shakespeare and put tons of hours coming up with lyrics telling a magnificent tale in a concept album, I wouldn't care. You didn't try to be understandable, I don't give a shit about what you are mumbling.

I don't care if a band is vegan, satanist, politically inclined, funny, decadent, christian, depressive... whatever floats your boat. I just like when it's done well, whatever the message.

I am SO mentally high fiving you for mentioning both Dax Riggs and Peter Steele. Honestly two of the most brilliant lyricists of our time. To add to the topic though, I view music as a total experience. The lyrics are part of that experience, so yes, they do matter, and I do pay attention to them. But if I'm just looking to listen to something aggressive and in your face ala Children Of Bodom's early stuff, or Hateform, lyrics aren't a big thing. BUT! If I'm listening to something like Acid Bath or Be'lakor, definitely a huge part of my enjoyment of the music. Of course, I'm also a vocalist, so paying attention to lyrics is a thing of habit.

I always read the lyrics and they do matter. For me, nothing kills a song more than bad lyrics...

Well I loved X Japan untill I read their lyrics. I still care for them but some of their stuff is just permanently tainted with annoyingly bitter taste of disappointment.

usually i like to read them. i suck a lot at understanding what any singer says in music, unless its slow paced haha. but if its a band that i like a lot then i usually like to read the lyrics as i listen to whatever album. some times theres songs that just hit home and i think are awesome, then there are songs about "ripping entrails from a virgins cunt", not trying to bash on CC, love the music, lyrics making me double take at the track title lol

Of course I read them. If I didn't, I'd never have known the incredibleness of Buddy Lackey's lyrics on 'A Social Grace'. And have you read the lyrics to Sabbat's 'History of a Time to Come' and (especially) 'Dreamweaver'?! Fucking astounding!

I don't find that metal as a whole has worse lyrics than any other genre - that's just silly. There are great lyrics, and there are horrible lyrics, and there are stupid lyrics, and funny lyrics, and sad, dark, etc. Metal covers everything, and that's what I love about it. It's exactly no different from instrumental or vocal ability; you've got your Venoms and you've got your Dream Theaters; you've got your Amanda McKittrick Roses and you've got your Edgar Allan Poes.

Sometimes. Lyrical themes have to be somewhat interesting to me to care. Other times I look at them if the music is really bad in hopes of the lyrics at least being acceptable.

If I cannot understand the vocals I usually have no interest in reading the lyrics because no lines really catch your ear.

I'm listening to Nastrond's 1995 album Toteslaught a lot lately. It's a black metal album with high screeching vocals and I can actually make out what is being said, some of the lines are so awesome it made me open the CD book and read the lyrics.

When I was in my early teens getting Carcass's Symphonies of Sickness (with Reek as bonus tracks with the original gore cover) was a mind blowing all enveloping experience. I would sit listening to the album and read the lyrics with my mom's medical dictionaries and assorted books and draw pictures of people being horribly mutilated and tortured. I can't remember ever being so changed by one single album, and I had no onslaught of dime a dozen goregrind bands, had no fucking internet. If I had I imagine it wouldn't have been as special.

I never really consider lyrics in a lot of death metal bands, say Disma, Immolation, Grave Miasma, Blaspherian, you know, real shit. Lots of lyrics about dead souls marching past giant monoliths, or what it is to be nonexistent/dead. goddamn good death metal has long passed dumbass Cannibal Corpse lyrics, if thats all you know of death metal take a better look around for fucks sake.

Pretty much this. Lyrics are generally a pretty important part of a song or album's concept, because language is thought's most direct form of expression and etc. etc. Listening to a Devin Townsend or OSI album without paying attention to the lyrics would seem pretty strange to me, most of the time. While I'm willing to listen to instrumental music or music without good lyrics on occasion (speaking of metal here), I can't really think of anything I'd count in my top 5/10 metal albums which has lyrics I don't like a fair bit. I suppose that it's not the lyrics by themselves in this case so much as that if you have a decent conception behind the music already, it shouldn't be as hard to write appropriate lyrics, putting forward the basic situation in more direct terms. Problems with lyrics are often symptomatic of problems with the music as a whole.

That said, good lyrics aren't in themselves enough to make music worth listening to, so that for example Kevin Moore's tracks with Dream Theater on 'Images and Words' onwards have some pretty great lyrics, but I don't generally like the tracks themselves as music, and as such don't tend to listen to them much. Moore's later work I do like, however, and the lyrics form an important part of them. I suppose that lyrics have to culminate the music, and gain their strength from it, not the other way around. Very few lyrics would make good poetry, very few poems would make good metal lyrics.

Sometimes some of the animosity towards lyrics seems to come from a perception that pop music is all about 'listening to lyrics' while metal is about listening to music, but generally I'm not sure that people listen to pop music for its great lyrical quality (the lyrics generally aren't all that impressive), and usually it seems to revolve more around the 'sing-along' format of the choruses and such (which can usually be reproduced with completely different lyrics, and often enough is; the lyrics usually aren't integrally connected with the music as part of a concrete whole) than the lyrical content as such. The lyrics are a mannequin, not the focus. There's no real reason why words which have meaning can't be used as an important part of a musical work, any more than how words sound can't be an important part of poetry.


Think this is fair enough. Metal's generally a bit of a subculture, and that can mean a lot of rubbish, but it also means some more freedom for individuals who choose to express themselves in it. I believe Devin Townsend's actually commented on that, associating metal with a type of creative freedom, at least to a relative extent. Metal has its bad stuff, in terms of songwriting, lyrics, and the rest, but the bad stuff is not institutionalised (so far as it is, it is only so within a certain niche, which generally leaves plenty more), so there's no real reason why it shouldn't have good lyrics, especially given a vast array of subgenres and the freedom to push things even further in progressive metal. There's benefits to not being 'serious' music.

Lyrics are essential, in my opinion.
Great lyrics are one of the things which can set metal apart from many other more mindless and vapid genres of music.
Reading the lyric booklet of a metal band that has awesome, intricate and well thought out lyrics is a joy.

True that Having an album with beautiful design and a lush booklet with good lyrics is an experience worth having.

It depends on the band for me.Bands like Deicide or Vital Remains are basically going to Satan this or that so i don't really pay that much attention to them.I know some of their lyrics but not all.Same goes for cannibal Corpse only it's going to be murder or rape or something.

With bands like Nile, Immolation, Slayer, ect, i pay more attention to the lyrics because if find them either interesting, well writen or both.I also pay more attention to the lyrics if i like the vocalist.

As a guitarist, i never pay more attention the the lyrics than the music.And i always read the lyrics/liner notes.