I don't always like being that guy, but sometimes I feel the need to speak up. I know gatekeepers can be annoying. Are there certain bands that make you wanna say your peace about why they are not Metal? I saw a list from a YouTuber who put AC/DC's Back In Black on a list of 10 albums for newbies to Heavy Metal. I'd have no issue if they were on a Hard Rock list. Yeah, they have a black cover and there's a song with Hell in the title. What about the sound of the music with open major chords? What about a song with "Rock N Roll" in the title?

Sonja and every metalcore, deathcore band.

Mostly just things that are obviously just rock music with more distortion. AC/DC or Guns n Roses.

Van Halen as well though some songs have obvious metal riffs on their albums.

Though was is called heavy metal today isn't what was called heavy metal in 1980.

As someone who was already a metalhead for a long time when nu-metal first came to be, I refuse to include any of those bands in the metal spectrum.

Very curious to know how they're not metal...

Sonja play oldschool style heavy metal (granted with its own set of quirks that help them stand out). How the fuck are they not metal?

Anyway, Deftones. I like them, they're good, but they aren't metal.

I'd actually say Sonja is one of the newer bands that most gets what that older, early 80s sort of metal was all about.

I just don't see how the first two Deftones albums aren't more than metal enough to make the cut.

They are gothic/industrial/alternative rock with a few heavy moments

Don't know about that at all. It sounds like the early 80s style of trad metal like Riot, Stormwitch and that kind of thing. She added some minor flourishes of other stuff but the songwriting is essentially exactly what that style was about. Nonstop propulsive riffs, a rock and roll attitude. I definitely didn't hear any industrial or alt rock...

It's a fine line to walk. I once heard someone casually call a pop-punk festival headlined by Sum 41 a "heavy metal" show, but I figured it was clearly best to just nod my head and say "yeah" - I mean, why go into Comic Book Guy mode when the guy clearly isn't interested in anything with loud guitars? It'll just come off as a narcissism-of-small-differences sort of thing.

It's so rare around here to bump into someone who even likes metal/metal-adjacent music anyway, I don't think it serves much purpose to issue "corrections" when things get mislabeled. Finicky, hyper-specific genre classification is helpful for "academic" purposes (say, if you want to construct a historical narrative or overview of a genre), and for talking to people with similar musical interests... But otherwise, I'm not sure what the point of the exercise would be.

That said, I have spent enough time on/around MA etc. to have the usual reflexive reaction, "Oh, Slipknot, deathcore, etc. isn't real metal," whether I have the nerve to say this aloud or not. I do take it with a grain of salt, like, it's just a quirk that's rubbed off on me from certain online communities, not worth getting too bent out of shape over.

I have never understood how Suffokate is still on here. 90% chugs, rooted completely in beatdown hardcore with a few melodeath tremolo and pedalpoint riffs.

Evanescence is a weird case for me because I don't really like when people call them a "metal" band, but at the same time they do have a vibe that gateways to other bands like Nightwish, Epica, and even Kamelot to an extent. I guess they're a "metalloid" band. There's a case where we can use that label for other ambiguous bands and records.

I can definitely hear some gothic and post-punk influence in their music, but it's still predominately metal. They occupy a similar space to Unto Others.

Rammstein. This band was quite popular and some people called it "metal" just because the music sounded "heavy" (I don't like their style at all and didn't want this band to be associated with metal genres in any way).

I find the idea of Back in Black being metal less objectionable than 90% of djent or whatever. Nearly every metalhead in 1980 liked Back in Black. The goofy mock-satanism, church bells, arpeggiated gloominess (laid back gloominess, sure, but still) etc. of Hell's Bells was provocative at the time in a way that completely leaned into the emerging heavy metal zeitgeist, and they flex a bit more with the lead guitar on that album than they did in the Bon Scott era.

Nu-metal/metalcore are my line in the sand and I don't consider them metal, no matter how gatekeepy that sounds. What does and doesn't count as a genre isn't a science, it's mostly a cultural debate, and those genres have a lot of cultural distance from "metal proper."

Nobody said Ghost yet?

Atmospheric black metal, a personal enemy of mine. The guys barely use any riffs and the music has nothing to do with what we usually call metal.

To the guys saying metalcore and nu metal, go back to the DeLorean, the 80s are calling again.

It makes my blood boil when people call Bon Jovi metal.

I've even had people say that I'm ignorant for not considering Bon Jovi a metal band.

I've also heard people say they were metal simply because they were marketed as such back in the day. That's sort of reminiscent of another thread here about how someone else said they had people insist Gojira is a death metal band because Wikipedia said so. (On a semi-related note, I get irate when I hear people call Gojira a death metal band. Granted, I definitely consider Gojira a metal band, but it enrages me when I hear people call Gojira a death metal band.)

But back to the original topic on hand, let it sink in that some people think others are ignorant if they don't think Bon Jovi are metal, or at least don't consider them to have been metal at some point.

I assume they're mostly older folks? Most of them are just using "metal" as a synonym for electric guitar music with hesher/80s glam aesthetics. They see the the poofy hair and ridiculous clothes, they remember the fact there was about a 90% venn diagram crossover between fans of Bon Jovi, Ozzy, Crue, Dio, etc. back in the 80s, and so they think, "metal." That look is simply what metal means to a huge amount of people.

Heavy metal, "pop metal," AOR, etc bled into each other a lot, which you can clearly hear in very old, influential, canon metal releases (Heaven & Hell, Holy Diver, and so on), so the idea Bon Jovi is metal isn't that unreasonable coming from a random normal person.

Bon Jovi was my favorite band when I was 11. They referred to themselves as a Rock N Roll band. I have accepted that people will call them Hair Metal based on their 80s look and their use of flashy solos with distorted guitar tones. Those things do not make them Metal, but to many they do.

If Motley Crue is in the archives, then I don't see why Bon Jovi couldn't be here too. Both bands play the same genre.

More often than not, it is the fans calling a band metal and not the band themselves. I've accepted that most people recognize the term "metal", but do not understand the type of sound that is associated with it.

Drone music

Strongly agree with this one, now we are talking.

Early Black Sabbath. Motorhead.

Agreed, though they definitely belong on this site. But I've always just regarded them as a (very heavy and very fast) rock n roll band.

It seemed like the term "Metal" was pretty nebulous back in 1979-1980 anyway. I would say that it was really the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (and a couple heavier bands from a few years earlier like Judas Priest and of course Black Sabbath) which gave Metal a more concrete and specifically defined sound. AC/DC, like a lot of those hard rock bands from the late 70s/early 80s, straddled that line pretty closely.

Bon Jovi on the other hand- by the mid-1980s Metal was pretty well defined, and it was pretty clear at that time that Bon Jovi's music lay outside that definition. For the record, I liked Bon Jovi for what they were- good time party rock n' roll, nothing too serious. But I never pretended that they were a metal band. This is where they- and some of their fans- got themselves some backlash, by trying to label themselves as such. Thrash bands (such as Exodus in particular) used to hate on Bon Jovi fans who claimed to be "metal" fans. I never cared as much with the same amount of triggering passion, but if I heard someone back then claim that Bon Jovi were metal, I would politely and diplomatically explain why they were not.

My guess is they are here because of their early stuff which was heavier than the other material.

"Shout at the Devil" was almost purely a heavy metal album. But later stuff like, say, "Dr. Feelgood" or "Girls...." is quite different in sound and overall approach. I would guess that Motley Crue were probably accepted into the Archives purely based on "Shout at the Devil."

If Shout at the Devil is a metal album, then Appetite for Destruction is a metal album too.

Another band that could fit that definition of metal is Kiss.

I remember in the past, it was stated on Mötley Crüe's Metal Archives entry that they were accepted onto Metal Archives based on Too Fast for Love and Shout at the Devil.

Either way, when compared to any Bon Jovi album, even the poppiest Mötley Crüe album seems like Darkness Descends by comparison.

Well, much of the time, it's the media that calls mislabels the bands metal, and I guess a lot of fans went with it. Not always the fault of the bands.

I remember reading an interview with KoRn in the late 1990s, and Jonathan Davis talked about how he despised seeing his own band be labeled metal by the presses and by people in general. He also asked for any record store who has their music in the metal section of the store to remove them from it.

Too easy almost haha.

They do fall in line with my current annoyance though, which is that Sleep Token band. Like Ghost, they have an aesthetic that feels metal to many people and unlike Ghost, they will occasionally use distorted guitars or distorted vocals but as we all know, that doesn't make them metal. They also like to jump between genres / styles between songs or even within songs, which can give a sense of "complexity," which I also think makes people ant to call them metal because those tendencies don't seem like a thing a mainstream rock band would do. But honestly, they're just a heavy alternative rock band who are influenced by prog rock, hip-hop, electronic genres, and (yes) a little bit of metal. The vocalist has that over-affected Hozier voice and then the music has a lot going on to ultimately do nothing.

There's a slew of these bands popping up all over TikTok. Sleep Token is one, Bad Omens is another. I'm sure there are plenty more.

This is as heavy and as metal as heavy metal can get



I do agree though with Drone, how's that metal?

It's the rolling drums, the chugging, the "soaring" vocal melodies that would be perfectly at home in an Omen song, the locomotive call & response dynamics between the vocals and riffs, etc. that make that Crue song metal.
Appetite for Destruction is way more boogie oriented. One look at that cover album of theirs shows how little metal influence they have. Lots of 70s punk--NY Dolls, Stooges, Dead Boys--but metal? Not so much. With that said GnR are an 80s band with guitar solos and high pitched vocals, so I'm ultimately at peace with the fact some people think of them as heavy metal.

I love the logic and understanding of so many people around here, you literally say:



"This? This is clearly 100% metal there is no doubt about it, anyone who questions it is an obtuse gatekeeper stuck in the 90's mentality, you have to be very ignorant not to accept it as metal music."



"Wtf, this is not even metal LOL"

Twats

-core bands, all of them. That's fucking tuneless noise akin to a jet engine on takeoff.

Babymetal. And I love Japanese girl bands, but ones who are real metalheads who write their own songs. Even pop rock bands like Gacharic Spin and Roselia are preferable.

Dark Tranquillity. They were metal once though.

I think that I'd rather hammer my balls than listen to a full Sunn O))) album.