Forget the 80s – the best time to be a British metalhead is now
The “new wave of British heavy metal” of the late 1970s and early 80s is the most important moment in the history of the genre. Not only did it launch titans such as Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Venom, but it turned “metal” from a pejorative phrase into a generationspanning subculture. In 1970, heavy music was a sprawl of bands mostly savaged by the press: Robert Christgau lambasted Black Sabbath’s debut as “bullshit necromancy”. A decade later, it had become a subculture so fertile that it needed its own magazine – Kerrang! – to cover it all.
Many British metalheads continue to hail this movement as the paragon of their favourite genre and as someone whose first exposure to rock music was through the bombast of Maiden, I understand why. However, to cling to such nostalgia is to blind yourself to the truth: the best time to be a British metalhead is now. While the titans of the 80s are enjoying their golden years in crammed arenas, the UK’s heavy metal underground is packed with more promising bands than ever before. Case in point: in 2022, four of Metal Hammer’s top 10 albums of the year were by British acts who debuted in the preceding decade. In 2012, that number was zero.
We can thank the Covid-19 lockdowns for affirming this resurgence of new metal bands, ironically, given they halted live music. For example, Glasgow groove metal crew Bleed from Within are now touring the US for the first time since their 2005 formation: a knockon effect of their May 2020 album Fracture finding millions of listeners among self-isolating metalheads. Released the same year, Sheffield metalcore brutes Malevolence experienced a similar boom with The Other Side EP, and they’ve just wrapped up a European run supporting such veterans as Trivium and Obituary.
When Download festival returned after the pandemic as a governmentbacked pilot event in 2021, it was restricted to solely booking young, British bands. That limitation unintentionally ended up translating viral success into real-world impact. Metalcore Liverpudlians Loathe played after their shoegaze single Two-Way Mirror was endorsed by Deftones the previous year – now, they’re on their second US tour in four months. Fellow Download performers Employed to Serve have just finished levelling arenas across Europe as support to Gojira. Sleep Token were also at the festival and are now one of the biggest acts in metal: their five 2023 singles have already been streamed 32m times on Spotify and made them TikTok heart-throbs. The wave is so strong that even bands who didn’t exist during the pandemic are riding it. Heriot released their first EP just 11 months ago and are now supporting Lamb of God.
Of course, this isn’t the first time British metal has commercially thrived since the 1980s. Bullet for My Valentine shot to prominence in the mid-2000s by blending the contemporary American metalcore sound with emo singalongs. In the process, they created an