Here are 32 '90s rock and metal songs that made their debut on movie soundtracks. Some later appeared on other albums and some didn't. Continue reading…
As of a few months ago, Neil Young was mastering his forthcoming album on the full moon. In April, Young shared that he was cooking up the follow-up to last year’s Talkin’ to the Trees at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu with his backing band, the Chrome Hearts. Soon after, Young shared the album’s title, Second Song. Today, he’s returned with more information about the project, including the title track and its Sep. 18 release date.
Back in August 2004, the first issue of Decibel was independently published in Philadelphia. Considering the climate at the time, this was a truly terrible idea.
The music industry was awkwardly transitioning from physical to digital mediums while print media was soon to be overthrown by social media. And while we had some magazine experience, none of us had ever published a commercial newsstand publication.
Through limited resources and unlimited will, we slowly pushed forward. The rest of the story is for another day, but 22 years and over 260 monthly issues later, Decibel still stands. Still fully independent.
Like many of you, we’ve seen this week’s layoffs at BrooklynVegan, Revolver and Alternative Press, as well as the downsizing at Metal Injection and MetalSucks earlier this year. These are people who dedicated their lives to promoting the music that defined ours, and they now face a market more uncertain than one we stepped into decades ago. Though we do suspect that you’ll see some of them contributing to the pages of Decibel very soon.
Of course, that defies the prevailing narrative that “independent music journalism is dead.” Alongside a handful of indie outlets, we operate without a single penny from outside investors. Maybe that means our margins are thinner. Maybe that means we don’t post as many selfies with Nergal. But at least we don’t have to pretend Sleep Token are good or stock Ghost dildos in our webstore. It’s the deal we’ve enthusiastically made.
Ultimately, to ensure independent journalism, you must support independent journalism. So, ahead of our 22nd anniversary issue, please consider subscribing to Decibel. Like you, we’re in this for life. Only (Independent) Print Is Real.
A music campaign works best when every post has a job. One clip may introduce the song, another may reveal the story behind it, and a later post may push fans to stream, pre-save, or buy a ticket. Random posting rarely creates that sense of movement.
For a single, album, or tour, start with one clear goal and build a sequence around it. Short-form video can create discovery, YouTube can hold longer material, and streaming profiles can turn attention into listening or ticket activity.
Start With One Campaign Goal
Clear goals make every piece of campaign content more purposeful
A release can generate streams, followers, pre-saves, merchandise sales, ticket sales, or press attention. Pick the outcome that matters most for the current phase.
A single often needs discovery. An album may benefit from pre-saves and repeat listening. A tour usually needs local awareness and ticket conversion.
Match the Goal to a Measurable Action
“Get people excited” gives a team little to measure. “Increase pre-saves before release day” or “sell tickets in Chicago during the next ten days” produces a clearer campaign.
Spotify’s current Countdown Pages allow fans to pre-save upcoming albums and EPs, preview tracklists, watch countdown videos, and receive the release in their library when it arrives.
Spotify reports that artists publishing a Countdown Page at least seven days before release see nearly twice as many pre-saves on average as artists publishing later.
Music marketing becomes easier when the campaign has a central idea. A song about leaving home could generate studio footage, lyric explanations, old photographs, fan stories, and live performances built around the same emotional thread.
Choose Repeatable Content Angles
Useful angles include the song, the artist’s personality, the making of the project, and fan participation. Rotate among them so every post adds a new piece.
A 20-second chorus performance might lead into a songwriting story two days later. An album campaign can introduce individual tracks or collaborators. A tour campaign can move city by city with venue footage, local memories, rehearsal clips, and set-list hints.
Prepare an Asset Bank Early
Collect vertical video, photographs, artwork crops, rehearsal audio, lyric cards, behind-the-scenes clips, and clean versions of key hooks before the campaign starts.
Artists who need additional promotional variations can also use Pollo AI’s AI UGC ad video generator to create presenter-led social videos from a script without organizing a separate shoot.
Plan the Campaign in Phases
Release day works better as a peak inside a longer arc.
Phase
Main purpose
Useful content
2 to 4 weeks before
Build curiosity
Teasers, artwork details, studio clips, pre-save posts
Release week
Convert attention
Song clips, video premieres, fan reactions, direct links
Following weeks
Extend interest
Live versions, lyric stories, remixes, creator posts
A rigid calendar can become stale when a surprising clip takes off early. Keep several slots open for fan videos, replies, press moments, or another version of a strong-performing idea.
TikTok for Artists, launched globally in 2025, provides daily-updated analytics for songs, posts, and followers, plus a Pre-Release tool for album campaigns. The TikTok artist platform helps artists decide which creative idea deserves another variation.
Give Each Platform a Specific Role
Short-form video can introduce music to audiences well beyond an artist’s existing followers
Reuse the core campaign idea while adapting the edit, opening seconds, caption, and call to action.
Use TikTok and Instagram for Discovery
Short-form video works well for hooks, performances, stories, visual jokes, and fan prompts. Aim for material people can react to, save, send, or remake.
Instagram also offers Trial Reels, which can show a Reel to non-followers first. Meta reported that, among creators who increased posting after trying the feature, 80% saw greater Reels reach from non-followers, while noting that results are not guaranteed. The company’s Trial Reels data makes the feature useful for testing ideas before a major release push.
Use YouTube as a Multi-Format Hub
YouTube can connect Shorts, official videos, live performances, visualizers, interviews, and community posts around one release. Its current artist resources recommend pre-release, release-day, and post-release strategies built across multiple formats.
A Short may introduce a chorus. A full video can become the main viewing moment. An acoustic performance can return the song to feeds later.
Treat Streaming Profiles as Conversion Pages
Refresh artist images, bios, featured releases, and links before a campaign begins. Fans arriving from social media should immediately see the music, merchandise, or dates being promoted.
For touring artists, Spotify can surface shows through artist profiles, personalized recommendations, and the Concerts Near You playlist. Its live-events tools give artists another route from listening activity to concert discovery.
Build Tour Campaigns City by City
Localized promotion makes individual tour dates feel more relevant to nearby fans
A general poster announces the route. Local content gives individual dates a pulse. Record a short message for the city, mention a past show there, tag the venue, or post a ticket update.
Increase Urgency Gradually
Early posts can announce the date and explain the show. Later content can reveal support acts, rehearsal footage, or availability updates. Final reminders work best when they contain useful information, such as limited tickets or doors and set times.
TikTok has expanded in-app ticketing partnerships that let eligible artists attach ticket links to videos in participating markets. Its expanded Ticketmaster partnership shows how social discovery and ticket purchase can sit close together.
Measure Fan Movement and Conversion
Views matter when they lead somewhere. Track profile visits, saves, pre-saves, streaming clicks, follower growth, email sign-ups, and ticket conversions.
A post with 40,000 views and almost no profile activity may contribute little to the campaign goal. A clip with 8,000 views that drives hundreds of pre-saves may carry far greater value.
.@Stray_Kids is breaking Spotify records ahead of its Nov. 21 release with “DO IT,” hitting 1 million streams on the pre-save-based Spotify Countdown—a first for a K-pop album. The album also topped Spotify’s Global Top 10 Countdown for three consecutive weeks, building hype for… pic.twitter.com/CGg7lOGxJC
Face-to-camera videos may outperform polished edits. Lyric clips may earn fewer views and more saves. Tour rehearsal footage may convert well in cities where ticket sales are already moving. Use those patterns to shape the next week.
A Simple Three-Week Single Campaign
Imagine an independent artist releasing a single in three weeks.
Week one introduces the visual world with a teaser, cover reveal, and studio clip. Week two brings the strongest chorus, a story about the lyric, and a fan prompt. Release week adds the full link, performance footage, reactions, and a thank-you video.
During the following two weeks, the artist can post an acoustic version, a fan-created clip, and a behind-the-scenes moment. Strong posts can receive new edits or alternate openings.
Build Momentum That Can Survive Release Day
A good social media campaign gives people several reasons to notice a project and a clear way to act once they care. Start with one goal, develop a recognizable creative idea, prepare enough assets to stay flexible, and keep watching how fans respond.
Singles benefit from repeated discovery. Albums benefit from a wider narrative. Tours benefit from local relevance and timely calls to action. Strong campaigns keep moving after launch day because fan response helps shape the next creative decision.
John Piotrowski, lead singer for Shadow Of Jupiter, hopes the band’s sound, feel, vibe, and attitude capture the experience of flipping through vinyl at a record store that year. It does not get more passionately precise than that, right?
Immediately, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon should come to mind. After that, arguably the greatest releases from The Who and Genesis, Quadrophenia and Selling England By The Pound. You also have debut albums from Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd. And, you also had the critical releases of Houses Of The Holy and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath as well.
But while Shadow Of Jupiter’s already distinctive tone, which has become more evident on their second release, Bones, is rooted in classic hard rock and well-placed prog elements, the band is a collective that cannot be defined even with all their influences and inspirations.
Their whole, as the popular saying goes, is bigger than the sum of their parts. The problem with even that is that the quote, which was attributed to Aristotle, is not correct. The word ‘sum’ was never used in that phrase found in Metaphysics.
The word was ‘beside’ and the whole sentence reads like this from a 1908 translation.
In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts.
This ‘whole’ in terms of the creative size and songwriting that Shadow Of Jupiter bring to the table is magically captured from this excerpt from a review of their album:
This is music with sand in its gears, blood on its fingers and fire in its veins. Bones does not simply move from song to song… Hell no. It drifts. It crawls. It runs. It explodes. It stretches massive riffs across wide open landscapes where crushing weight meets mighty grooves and, at certain times, a cosmic atmosphere. Colin Peterson’s guitars carve out towering walls of sound, Scott Brakebill’s bass rolls like distant thunder, Adam Kazragys’ drums lock into deep, primal grooves, and John Piotrowski’s vocals rise like a weathered storyteller yelling from a high and weathered peak. Joop Konrad, Stoner Hive
Shadow of Jupiters is something well beyond their parts, and this was organically and warmly unravelled in my one-hour interview with all four members.
My first question feels like a question that would be further down the list. But, I know Colin (guitarist) and John (vocalist) really well. In fact, we had a friendship that was already forming prior to me seeing them live at RippleFest in Austin in 2024.
Friendship. The whole stoner/desert/doom scene is built on this. Connection transcends the music–because of the music.
That’s why I wanted my first question to be kind of a curveball. There is lots of baseball fandom in the band.
Since I have all four members of Shadow of Jupiter here, I am going to ask you a question about musical influences that is different. You each have to, without repeating another band member’s choice, give me an artist that is an influence that the audience would probably not expect.
Also, try to stretch the collective “perimeter” of the band’s influence with your selection.
John: Minor Threat.
Colin: Thin Lizzy
Scott: Grateful Dead
Adam: Toto
Attitude. Guitarists. Jams. Precision.
In many ways, the band plays within the territory of those words, with deep complexion and personality. It was hard not to go off on a serious tangent when Colin mentioned Thin Lizzy, my favourite band of all time.
We managed to mention all the great guitarists of the band without getting too derailed!
My next question birthed an answer that led to the opening of this article–1973.
Who designed the album cover?
John: “Well, we wanted to go with a vibe that conveyed original art and original work. We knew the raven was going to be a central theme to the cover, and we wanted to convey something that you might flip through when searching for albums back in 1973. (John remembered the artist’s name, Fajar Rahadian, later in the interview)
So, who then designed the logo?
Colin: I am going to have to go back and check on that, as the name escapes me now. However, we loved what was created because it has this feel of something you might associate with an absinthe house in France.”
Even the standard questions around album and logo design yielded answers that were doused in old school memories. My closing question on this topic was one that was prefaced by my reluctance to “always know the answer”, removing the mystery associated with origins of musical ideas.
The band’s name. What does it mean?
Scott: “I was hoping you would ask that question, because I don’t even know!”
Adam would also chime in, but not before giving some wrong answer about it being a reference to the size of this head. Yes, we were all laughing at this point!
Adam: “I also don’t know. I just got a text message from you guys (John and Colin) that I was interested in playing in your little project.”
Thankfully, yes, thankfully, the story behind the band’s name was kept a mystery on my small insistence.
I then moved onto the title track of the album, Bones. And, not too surprisingly, the conversations that came out of my inquiry into this song were deep and satisfying. I didn’t have a question so much, but I wanted the band to comment on anything related to the creation of this opening track, which has so many things going–even in the first 90 seconds. My sister heard The Beatles. I heard Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction.
Colin: “John and I have a long history, and some of that involves taking psychedelics while listening to Ravi Shankar. We just wanted the main riff of the song to be placed later in the song, building up to it. Also, the song is a pure collaborative effort of the whole band.”
My brain goes to weird places for associations when discussing music or mathematics. So, I reached for the show Better Call Saul in describing the band’s music. It is a slow burn. I also shared this quote from the photographer Glen Friedman on his definition of punk: “An intense obligation to the truth of your innermost self”
John: “That reference to Better Call Saul was epic, and made my heart swell. We’re able to create music that is like this because the scene is so cool. The scene is so wild and eclectic! From day one, we’ve been welcomed by so many bands, and we’ve been allowed to be as creative as we want. Let us play what we want to play from the heart”
What is your go-to Zeppelin and Sabbath albums in 2026?
Colin: Physical Graffiti and Mob Rules
Adam: Led Zeppelin II, because of Moby Dick and Black Sabbath
Scott: Song Remains The Same (Soundtrack) and Black Sabbath
John: Led Zeppelin III (my go-to!) and Mob Rules
What is your non-musical inspiration in your life?
Colin: “Ed Pashke, a local Chicago artist. I love his modern and twisted style.”
Scott: “My job as a pipe construction fitter has been an inspiration between building complex structures from small parts, and how it relates to creating a song.”
Adam: “Frank Lloyd Wright. I love the order and structure of his designs and how he used space to inspire creativity.”
John: “Commitment to social justice. I am constantly inspired by activists who are involved in projects to better the lives of others.”
What is your favorite song on the new album, but you can’t say Bones?
Adam: Rumblestrip
Scott: Riot Dog
Colin: For Heaven Above
John: For Heaven Above
The whole interview goes much deeper into a band that exudes depth of inspirations, creativity, and connection through music, friendship, and community.
This is Shadow Of Jupiter’s humble orbit, and I was lucky to go on board with the full crew for 60 minutes.
Today is Bandcamp Friday. For 24 hours, from midnight to midnight Pacific Time, Bandcamp waives its normal revenue share on music and merchandise purchases. The money goes to the artist or label, minus payment-processing fees and, where relevant, the artist’s label or fulfilment costs.
