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General Information

Personnel:
Bettie Floyd – vocals
Adam Sanders – vocals
Joey Grimaldi – guitar
Ryan Metroka – drums
Dave Hale – bass
Salem Belladonna – keys, cello

Producer: Joey Grimaldi
Release Date: September 18, 2026
Record Label: Eclipse Records

Setting the Scene

I am loving 2026 in music! So many old-timers returning, and so many debuts that feel like they’re the start of something huge. Here’s another one, this time a symphonic metal masterpiece.
Valkyrie’s Fire are a symphonic metal band from Nashville, Tennessee, who just released their debut album, Out of Darkness. The 13-track album marks the beginning of what could be a very interesting chapter for the band.

First Impression

Out of Darkness hits like a huge debut from a band that already knows exactly what they are capable of. A 13-track album can easily become exhausting, especially when you consider the length of some of these tracks. However, the pacing, production, and way the vocals are spread across the record keep the momentum going from start to finish. It has the heavy orchestration and variety you would expect from top-tier symphonic metal, and the music sounds far more experienced than you might expect from a debut album.

Similar Sounds

If you’re into any of these artists, this album should be on your radar.

Visions of AtlantisTemperanceAd InfinitumDragony

The Artwork

The album’s artwork, designed by Jan Yrlund, shows a lonely figure stepping out of a dark cave and facing a winding mountain path with a huge, fiery sunrise in the distance. It takes the title Out of Darkness pretty literally, but the contrast between the pitch-black cave and the bright golden light works really well. It also fits the music, which moves from heavy and darker moments into huge, anthemic power metal sections.

Track on Repeat

“Shattered”

After a song like “Burning Sky,” you might expect the next track to slow things down and simply keep the album moving. Instead, “Shattered” is one of the biggest surprises on the record for me. It starts at a calmer pace, but quickly shows that there is much more to it than that. The symphonic parts are huge, the guitars sound great, and there is plenty going on musically without making the song feel crowded. Both vocalists get their moments to shine, before the song ends with Bettie’s softer, almost serenading vocals. For me, it is easily one of the standout moments on the entire album.

In-depth Notes

Musical Shape 🎸

The guitars and orchestrations on Out of Darkness work together beautifully, with the band moving between huge orchestral openings and driving metal riffs in songs like “Valkyrie’s Fire” and “Nocturne.” The faster guitar leads in “Evermore,” “Cascade,” and “Skylark” add another side to the album, while “I See The Angels Fly” and “Bone and Thorn” show that the band can slow things down just as well. Both are beautifully written ballads and could easily work as singles on their own. The orchestrations are especially impressive on “Shattered,” where they take total command of the song, while the ten-minute closer “I Will Rise Again” uses them to build its longer sections and bring the album toward its conclusion. All of this comes through clearly in the production, which gives the guitars, drums, vocals, and orchestral parts enough room to be heard without making the arrangements feel cluttered.

Vocal Performance 🎤

The vocals of Bettie and Adam are a huge part of what makes Out of Darkness work so well. Their voices complement each other beautifully, especially in the big choruses of songs like “Evermore” and the ballad “Bone and Thorn.” Bettie gets to take the lead on “Cascade,” where her voice has a very distinct character that goes far beyond just hitting high notes. She also takes a much softer approach at the end of “Shattered,” closing the song with calm, almost serenading vocals. The harsher vocals also come in at the right moments, adding more weight when the songs need it. Mikael Sehlin’s appearance on “Burning Sky” is another great example of this. Sehlin may be a big name, but he is not simply there as a big name brought in for marketing. His particular vocal approach is exactly what the song needs at that point in the album, creating a great contrast with the operatic vocals and giving the track a heavier edge. That heavier side returns later in “I Will Rise Again,” giving the epic closer an extra impact.

Themes and Concepts 💭

The album tackles resilience, vengeance, and rebirth, with cosmic imagery and fire running through its themes. These ideas go beyond the lyrics, with the music itself carrying much of the emotional weight. The sweeping orchestrations and heavy arrangements help take the listener from deep grief to defiant triumph, giving the album’s themes a clear musical progression.

Final Verdict

★★★★★★★★★★

If aliens visit Earth and ask me what symphonic power metal is, I’m showing them this album. Valkyrie’s Fire have created a masterpiece with Out of Darkness, perfectly balancing brilliant orchestrations, beautiful guitar work, and iconic vocals.

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Perfect For…

Emotional Struggle – escape emotions through some heavy tunes
Nature – unplugged from the world, plugged into the universe
Working – listen to while working to focus your energy
Creating Art – perfect to enhance your creativty

Get the Album

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The post Album Review | Valkyrie’s Fire – “Out of Darkness” first appeared on FemMetal – Goddesses of Metal.

Learn how to pray for the pleasure of having nothing
Here for you, so choose me, use me, lose me, until I die 

Love can make a person remarkably inventive about the terms of their own disappearance. Give everything away, call it devotion, and eventually even the damage starts looking like proof that something extraordinary is happening. On Like Moths, Italian dark synthpop project Hermidgets follows that reasoning to its terrible conclusion, with two people drawn into a relationship whose destructive potential has become part of its appeal. The single accompanies a disturbing new video and offers the fourth preview of a third album expected in early 2027.

A deep, bass-heavy opening gives way to rhythmic, buzzing synthesizers, with Hermidgets’ baritone entering low and assured as the bassline and percussion settle into a thoroughly danceable groove. That persistent synth melody keeps everything moving, its abrasive edge making the tune all the more satisfying. There is something of Fad Gadget in the electronics, a trace of Brendan Perry in the voice’s sonorous gravity, and the immediate appeal of a late-1980s club hit in the way the parts fit together. The singing lends the song its weight; the rhythm makes carrying it feel almost indecently easy.

The chorus lands hard on “She grants me a loaded gun,” then leaves room for the synth line to take over, its bright, wiry melody carrying a little of the peculiar magic of an old eight-bit machine. That instrumental turn is a hook in its own right, drawing the ear straight toward “I will never be the same without your deadly grace.” Hermidgets has written one of his best songs yet, catching the listener between the pleasure of an exceptionally good refrain and the awful bargain being sung.

The lyrics make surrender sound increasingly devotional. “Learn how to pray for the pleasure of having nothing” imagines a point at which the loss of identity, possessions, and boundaries becomes something actively sought. The repeated invitation to be chosen, used, and discarded gives that desire an unsettling clarity. Both people remain caught in the attraction, feeding a bond they understand may consume them. By the time the moths appear, the fire has become the destination, and the promise of being wanted has swallowed any concern about what might survive.

The video gives that disappearance a physical form. Shot in stark black and white against a dark background, it confines our attention to Hermidgets’ head, bare shoulders, and hands as white modeling clay obscures and distorts his features. Palms press against the face; fingers pull the material into ridges and folds; the mouth opens through a surface that seems continually on the verge of closing over it. The face becomes a succession of unstable sculptures, with black pigment introducing another disturbance late in the performance. At moments, the effort of singing seems to be the only thing keeping a recognizable person visible beneath the mass.

There is a strong resemblance to Frank Tovey’s shaving-cream performances as Fad Gadget, where a familiar substance smeared across the body became an instrument of grotesque theatre. Hermidgets’ stated inspiration is French artist Olivier de Sagazan, whose transformations of the face and body provide a more direct point of reference for the clay and contorted gestures. The video concept developed independently of the song, making their eventual correspondence especially apt: the figure physically works at his own erasure while the lyrics describe an equally willing dissolution. It also extends Hermidgets’ longstanding commitment to anonymity, allowing the face to occupy the entire frame while withholding the usual reassurance of a recognizable artist.

Watch the video for Like Moths below:

Hermidgets is an Italian electronic project built on years of experience in the studio and onstage, with songwriting, performance, and self-produced visuals bound together by a deliberately anonymous identity. Distorted synthpop, darkwave, and intimate songwriting form the basis of the work, while the decision to keep personal biography at a distance gives listeners room to establish their own relationship with it.

The debut album, The Mire, appeared in November 2020, introducing songs including This Is Over and Nothing’s Perfect. A Flaw and Perks followed in 2021, eventually joining Meaninglessness and We Tend to Disappear on the June 2024 mini-album NIHIL. For that record, Hermidgets worked with a deliberately limited setup of two analog synthesizers, drum samples, and voice, using those restrictions to concentrate the arrangements and their emotional force.

The next album began to take shape publicly with Fall Apart in July 2025, followed by Sundown that December and Could I Be Better in March 2026, the latter revisiting Could Be Better from the debut. Like Moths continues that sequence with some of the project’s most immediate songwriting and most confrontational imagery.

Like Moths was mixed by Matteo Sandri and mastered by Giovanni Versari. The single is out now, with Hermidgets’ third album expected in early 2027.

Listen to Like Moths below and order the single here.

Follow Hermidgets:

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• Spotify
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The post “Your Gaze Consumes Me” — Dark Synthpop Artist Hermidgets Follows Desire Into the Fire in Video for “Like Moths” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

Sue Foley will release a new holiday album, Alone (Together) A Holiday Companion, a blues-focused collection that explores both the loneliness and connection that can come with the holiday season.

Rooted in Texas blues with elements of jazz, the eight-song album takes a subdued approach to holiday music, combining Foley’s electric guitar work with laid-back rhythms and a mix of original songs, seasonal material and blues covers.

The album follows Foley’s GRAMMY-nominated One Guitar Woman and puts her electric guitar back at the forefront. Rather than focusing exclusively on traditional Christmas songs, Alone (Together) A Holiday Companion includes material designed to work beyond the holiday season.

“I made this album for people who find the holidays difficult, especially those who are spending them alone,” Foley explains. “It’s meant to be a companion, to bring a little comfort and connection at a time of year that can be hard for a lot of people. For anyone spending the holidays alone, this is for you.”

The album’s first single is Foley’s interpretation of AC/DC’s “Ride On,” originally released on the band’s 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Foley takes the Bon Scott-era song back toward its blues roots with a more relaxed arrangement.

As Foley describes it, “‘Ride On’ is classic Bon Scott era AC/DC, but at its heart it’s straight-up blues. We wanted to take that raw, blues-rock edge of the original and pull it back toward something more like Jimmy Reed: lowdown, hypnotic and laid-back. It felt completely natural to me. It’s a great blues song.”

Along with “Ride On,” the album features Foley originals “‘Tis the Season,” “Just Another Day” and “Jingle Blues (Cha-Cha).” The track listing also includes “Merry Christmas Darling,” “Christmas Blues,” “Santa Claus Do You Ever Get the Blues?” and “I’ll Take Care of You.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Merry Christmas Darling – 5:32
2. ‘Tis the Season – 3:57
3. Christmas Blues – 2:52
4. Just Another Day – 7:13
5. Santa Claus Do You Ever Get the Blues? – 4:34
6. Jingle Blues (Cha-Cha) – 4:28
7. I’ll Take Care of You – 6:14
8. Ride On – 4:47

The vinyl edition places tracks 1-4 on Side A and tracks 5-8 on Side B.

The post Sue Foley covers AC/DC on new album appeared first on Blues Rock Review.

“This one was difficult because we definitely wanted to do the band. It feels so right to do the band. It’s too early to make masks and outfits and be sure of that stuff. “

The post Clown Addresses Why Slipknot Didn’t Appear In The “Arsenal” Video Via New Behind The Scenes Featurette appeared first on Theprp.com.

Σtella!!!! The Greek indie/pop artist Σtella returned this week with a new single for Sub Pop, co-produced by the tasteful and well-traveled Rodaidh McDonald. “Belinda” is a beautiful piece of work, carefully crafted but heartfelt, with lots of smart production choices to accentuate the music’s power. Rafael Cohen of !!!, who worked on Σtella’s 2025 album Adagio, also contributes here.

The post Σtella – “Belinda” appeared first on Stereogum.

On the cotton candy sky
Written every moment of life
For all eternity
Wonder why we are even alive

Some records come from a scene, some from a city, and some seem to come from that ugly five-minute interval after you have stared at your phone too long and suddenly hate civilization. Faded Flowers, the latest album from Turkish Darkwave duo Ductape, belongs to the third category. It looks around at modern life: crowded rooms, digital selves, obedient routines, private disintegration, and finds a species that has become astonishingly good at maintaining appearances while quietly running itself into the ground.

Çağla Güleray and Furkan Güleray formed Ductape in 2019 in Istanbul, where their mix of post-punk, darkwave, Turkish and English lyrics quickly carried them well beyond the usual underground boundaries. Four albums and two EPs later, they have relocated their creative base to France. Geography changes; the unease travels well.

On Faded Flowers, that unease has acquired a larger target.

The title gives you the central image without turning it into homework: people as flowers left too long beneath bad light, drained by repetition, expectation, isolation, and the exhausting business of becoming whatever the surrounding machinery finds acceptable. You can hear that pressure everywhere. The basslines have the cold discipline of public transport at six in the morning. Synthesizers cut through with little sympathy. Furkan’s guitar keeps finding ways to sound agitated without becoming decorative, sometimes stalking around Çağla’s voice, sometimes answering it, sometimes scraping at the walls.

Çağla’s magnificent voice remains the great destabilizing force in Ductape. She can sound detached enough to frighten you, then suddenly let some exposed nerve show through before the song has time to make a ceremony of it. There is very little comfort in that delivery, which suits an album concerned with the absurdity of living among millions of people and still feeling marooned.

That particular contradiction runs all through Faded Flowers. Everyone is visible now. Everyone is reachable. Everyone is encouraged to construct a public version of themselves, polish it, post it, improve it, defend it, sell it, then wake up tomorrow and do the same miserable maintenance all over again. Somewhere along the line, identity became administrative labour.

Ductape sounds thoroughly fed up with the arrangement.

The album keeps circling the false authorities people submit to without necessarily believing in them: social roles, digital identities, manufactured ideals, systems of power, inherited expectations, all those little invisible rules that become oppressive mostly because nobody remembers agreeing to them. There is anger in these songs, but also exhaustion, and the exhaustion may be more interesting. Rage still assumes you have energy to spare.

Fine considers one dubious convenience of hitting bottom: at least you can stop pretending the view is lovely. The album’s first single follows a collapse through pain and disorientation toward an unexpected sense of ownership, as Çağla finds a place for herself inside the very circumstances that have undone her. A steady bassline and luminous synthesizers carry her weary composure, giving that uneasy acceptance room to develop. There is something wonderfully suspect about feeling comfortable down there, and the song lets the suspicion sit beside the relief. Within an album preoccupied with keeping up appearances, surrendering the performance becomes its own small freedom.

The accompanying black-and-white video turns that process into a homemade alchemical experiment. Filmed at Misuc in Ankara, it casts the duo as silent-film experimenters collecting ingredients and tending a potion among curious specimens. Ductape handled the direction, styling, and production, with camera work by Mert Yalçın and editing by Çağla Güleray. Its antique laboratory makes an apt workshop for two people attempting to assemble another version of themselves.

Standout track Obscure moves with a bassline so blunt and heavy it seems capable of carrying the song by itself, while Furkan Güleray’s distorted guitar keeps worrying at the edges, leaving abrasions rather than decoration. Synths hang overhead with an icy, almost antiseptic quality, giving the music the uneasy stillness of a room where something unpleasant has already been said. Çağla Güleray sings in English, her low register remarkably composed as she picks through disillusionment without dressing it up for sympathy. That restraint makes the words hit harder. Stolen light, dead idols, resentment calcified through repetition, the dull vacancy that follows years of believing in something that eventually reveals itself as another instrument of control: Obscure gathers these ideas until the song begins to feel less like despair than the slow recognition of how thoroughly faith can be exploited. There is damage here, certainly, but also the uncomfortable clarity that comes when the old explanations have finally stopped working.

Its Berlin performance video brings that severity onto the stage. Directed by Altay Erlik, with cinematography by Emrah Celik and laser animation by Peter Isachenko, the clip concentrates on the duo’s physical presence, giving the song’s accusations the directness of an encounter across a crowded room.

On Gölgesiz, the effort of continuing becomes almost physical. Sung in Turkish, the album’s second single carries accumulated sorrow through persistent drums and guitar figures that seem caught in the same argument with themselves. Çağla keeps her delivery measured, making fatigue audible through the weight she gives each phrase. The rhythm maintains its appointment with the next bar while the person inside it struggles to find a reason to follow. That uneasy relationship between bodily momentum and emotional depletion gives the song its force, extending the album’s concern with lives organised around obligations that have outlasted their meaning.

Made during Ductape’s Latin American tour, the monochrome DIY video places Çağla against expanses of water and open space, her figure often reduced to a silhouette. Visual distortions make her outline appear unstable, as though even occupying a body has become difficult work. The images give the song’s isolation a scale that the surrounding emptiness only enlarges.

Faded Flowers gains its pull from the sense that decay is something social as much as personal. The individual breaks down because the surrounding structure is already cracked. The city keeps moving. The screen keeps glowing. The machine keeps asking for another password. Somewhere inside all that, a person still has to decide who they are. Ductape leave that question open, with the bass still moving underneath it.

Listen to Faded Flowers below and order the album here.

To celebrate the album release, Ductape have announced headline shows and festival dates across Europe well into 2027.

Tour Dates

2026

• September 25 — Karlsruhe, Germany — Die Stadtmitte
• September 26 — Rüsselsheim, Germany — Das Rind
• October 23 — Moers, Germany — Bollwerk 107
• October 24 — Reutlingen, Germany — Takt Bizarre Festival, Kulturzentrum franz.K
• November 14 — Madrid, Spain — Santuario Fest, Sala Groove
• November 20 — Copenhagen, Denmark — Rust
• November 21 — Gothenburg, Sweden — The Abyss
• November 26 — Hannover, Germany — SubKultur
• November 27 — Münster, Germany — Gleis 22
• November 28 — Bochum, Germany — Gleis 9
• November 29 — Porto, Portugal — Auditório CCOP
• December 1–6 — Toulouse, France — La Setmana Santa*
• December 5 — Belgrade, Serbia — Klub Under
• December 11 — Sofia, Bulgaria — The Pit, Loud Music Bar
• December 18 — Ljubljana, Slovenia — Klub Gromka

2027

• February 6 — Leipzig, Germany — Moritzbastei
• February 14 — Nantes, France — Cold Crash
• May 6–8 — Berlin, Germany — Out Of Line Weekender, ASTRA Kulturhaus*
• May 7 — Bielefeld, Germany — Cantine Bielefeld
• May 8 — Übach-Palenberg, Germany — Rockfabrik
• July 23 — Cologne, Germany — Call The Ship To Port, MS RheinMagie
• July 31–August 1 — Thale, Germany — Unter dem Himmel, Harzer Bergtheater*
• October 9 — Graz, Austria — PPC

*Festival date range; Ductape’s exact performance day remains unconfirmed in the listings checked.

Follow Ductape:

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The post Turkish Darkwave Duo Ductape Confront the Slow Decay of Modern Life on New Album “Faded Flowers” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

The 1990s were supposed to be the decade metal died. Grunge arrived, glam collapsed overnight, and the industry decided that guitars with distortion and hair past the shoulders were finished. What actually happened is that metal went underground, got angrier, and came back out having invented groove metal, nu-metal, industrial metal and the most extreme music the genre had produced to that point. These are the thirteen bands who did it.

Nobody planned any of this. The decade has no unifying sound and no scene that connects the bands on this list — a Brazilian thrash band, a Florida death metal outfit, a masked nine-piece from Iowa and a horror-punk act from New York have essentially nothing in common except a ten-year window.

That’s the point. The 90s didn’t have a sound. It had a survival instinct.

How this list was made

Four things, weighed against each other.

Influence. How many bands exist differently because this one existed. Weighted heaviest, because the decade’s whole story is what got built.

Decade impact. What they actually did in the 90s — not before, not after. A band with one enormous 90s record can outrank a band with a long career and a quiet decade.

Innovation. Whether they made something that didn’t exist before they made it.

Endurance. Whether the records still work now, thirty-odd years on.

Those criteria pull hard against each other, and where they conflict is where this list gets contentious. A few of the absences are explained properly further down, because some very obvious names aren’t here and the reasons matter.

The legacy of the 80s: from glam to grit

As the decade opened, the excesses of 80s glam were collapsing and the appetite had shifted to something heavier and more honest. The thrash titans — Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax — had laid the groundwork with speed and socio-political fury.

It was Metallica who bridged thrash and the mainstream with the Black Album in 1991, and its commercial scale proved metal could still dominate even as a new sound rose out of Seattle. We’ve ranked their whole catalogue here, and the Black Album sits second on it.

Grunge’s impact, and metal’s response

Nirvana and Pearl Jam didn’t kill metal. They changed what it had to do to survive.

Some bands absorbed grunge’s emotional weight and made something new out of it — Alice In Chains and Deftones both belong in that category. Others went the opposite way and doubled down on brutality until the mainstream stopped being a consideration at all. Pantera chose that, and it worked so completely that the entire decade bent around it.

The subgenres the 90s built

While the charts looked elsewhere, four entire genres were being invented underground.

Groove metal. Pantera led it with the Southern-fried, chugging riffs of Cowboys from Hell and Vulgar Display of Power, and it became the blueprint for a decade of bands.

Death metal. Florida exploded — Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, Death — with ultra-fast tempos, guttural vocals and a level of extremity nobody had attempted.

Black metal. The Scandinavian scene brought a raw, lo-fi aesthetic and an ideology that made death metal look tame.

Nu-metal. The back half of the decade fused heavy riffs with hip-hop and electronics, and brought an entirely new audience into a genre that had been told it was finished.

Loaded Radio Recommends – 13 Metal Albums from the 90s That Prove Grunge Didn’t Win

Number 13 – Machine Head

Oakland’s Machine Head arrived in 1994 with a record that sounded like thrash had been handed a hydraulic press.

Burn My Eyes fused thrash aggression with a groove heavy enough to move a room, and it became the biggest-selling debut in Roadrunner’s history at the time. Robb Flynn had come out of Vio-lence with a clear idea of what he wanted, and the result was a record that arrived fully formed.

What makes it a cornerstone is how much of the following decade you can hear in it. Every band who tried to weld technical riffing to a groove in the mid-90s was working from this template, whether they’d admit it or not.

Number 12 – Deftones

Hailing from Sacramento, California, Deftones emerged as sonic pioneers, challenging the boundaries of heavy music with their captivating There’s an argument that Deftones don’t belong on a metal list at all, and it’s the wrong argument.

The Sacramento band spent the 90s building something nobody else was attempting — metal, shoegaze, grunge and alternative rock folded into each other until the seams disappeared. Around the Fur in 1997 is where it clicked: crushing heaviness underneath genuinely beautiful melodies, and Chino Moreno moving between a whisper and a scream inside a single bar.

They got filed as nu-metal because of when they arrived. They’ve outlived every band they were filed alongside, and the reason is right here — they were the only ones in that wave interested in atmosphere.

Number 11 – Korn

Bakersfield in 1994, and nothing sounded like it.

Korn‘s self-titled debut did something genuinely rare: it created a genre rather than joining one. Down-tuned seven-strings, a bass played like a percussion instrument, hip-hop rhythms underneath metal riffs, and Jonathan Davis singing about things nobody in this music had been willing to say out loud.

It was a commercial slow burn and a cultural detonation. Within four years, nu-metal was the biggest thing in heavy music and every major label had signed three bands trying to be this one.

Whatever you think of what followed, the debut is the source and it still sounds uncomfortable.

Number 10 – Fear Factory

Los Angeles, 1995, and Fear Factory made the album that taught metal what to do with a machine.

Demanufacture is the landmark — a record about man versus technology that sounds exactly like its subject. Raymond Herrera‘s drumming is so precise it was regularly mistaken for programming, Burton C. Bell alternated clean singing with roars in a way that became the template for a hundred bands, and the industrial elements weren’t decoration on top of metal, they were structural.

Nine Inch Nails made industrial rock palatable. Fear Factory made industrial metal heavy, and everything from Rammstein’s precision to modern djent’s mechanical feel runs back through it.

Number 9 – Sepultura

Belo Horizonte, and the most fearless reinvention any metal band attempted in the decade.

Sepultura could have kept making thrash records and been fine. Instead Chaos A.D. in 1993 slowed everything down, brought in tribal percussion and Brazilian rhythms, and stripped the songs back to something primal — and then Roots in 1996 went considerably further, recording with the Xavante people in the Mato Grosso.

It split their audience and it changed the genre. Nu-metal’s rhythmic approach, the entire idea that metal could absorb music from outside its own tradition — both start here.

Max Cavalera left in 1996 and the band never fully recovered from it, which is its own argument. What they did between 1993 and 1996 stands regardless.

Number 8 – Black Sabbath

An odd inclusion on a 90s list, and a defensible one.

The band that invented all of this spent most of the decade in disarray — Dehumanizer in 1992 reunited them with Ronnie James Dio and is genuinely strong, and then it fell apart again almost immediately.

What earns the placement is 1997. The original four — Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward — reunited for the first time in nearly twenty years, and the timing mattered enormously. Metal had spent a decade being told it was over. Sabbath coming back, to genuine mainstream attention, reminded a very large audience where all of it came from.

The Reunion live album went platinum. In a decade about survival, the godfathers showing up and being welcomed was its own kind of statement.

Number 7 – Dream Theater

Formed on Long Island, New York, by three musicians who’d met at Berklee and left within a year, Dream Theater spent the 90s proving that virtuosity hadn’t died with the 80s.

Images and Words in 1992 is the record that built progressive metal as a modern genre. “Pull Me Under” became an unlikely radio hit, which nobody involved expected from a song in irregular time signatures, and the album’s success created a commercial space for technical music that simply hadn’t existed.

Every prog-metal band that followed — Opeth’s heavier turns, Between the Buried and Me, half of what djent became — is downstream of this. They made complexity a selling point at exactly the moment the industry was rewarding simplicity.

Number 6 – Cannibal Corpse

Buffalo, New York, and the band who made extremity into a career.

Cannibal Corpse spent the 90s being banned, protested and named in legislatures, and it did nothing except make them bigger. Tomb of the Mutilated in 1992 is the landmark — relentless tempos, Chris Barnes‘ guttural vocals, and lyrics designed to be unprintable.

What gets missed is how good the band actually is underneath the controversy. The riffing is intricate, the arrangements are tighter than the genre required, and they’ve now outlasted virtually everyone who tried to have them banned.

They’re also the biggest-selling death metal band in history, which is a strange sentence about a band whose entire output is about dismemberment.

Number 5 – Tool

Los Angeles, and a band who refused every rule about how this was supposed to work.

Tool gave no interviews worth the name, made videos that showed no faces, wrote songs in time signatures nobody could dance to, and got enormous anyway. Ænima in 1996 is the decade’s most quietly influential metal record — progressive, psychedelic, heavy, and structured more like a piece of composition than a collection of songs.

Maynard James Keenan made a virtue of withholding himself, which in a decade obsessed with authenticity was its own kind of provocation. Danny Carey‘s drumming reset expectations for what the instrument could do in this music.

They also made patience a commercial strategy, and it’s still working thirty years later.

Number 4 – Slipknot

One album in the 90s. It was enough.

Slipknot‘s self-titled debut arrived in June 1999 out of Des Moines, Iowa, and it functioned less like a record than an event. Nine members. Masks and boiler suits. Three percussionists. A DJ. A level of onstage chaos that made everything around it look polite.

The reason it’s this high on a decade list with a single album to its name is what happened next — that record is the pivot point between 90s nu-metal and everything heavy music became in the 2000s. It went platinum without radio support, and it created the template for a generation of bands who understood that presentation was part of the music.

There’s a fair argument that one album shouldn’t outrank bands with three. There’s a better one that says this album did more in seven months than most bands manage in a decade.

Check This Out – SLIPKNOT MEMBERS: The Definitive 2026 Roster and Status Breakdown

Number 3 – White Zombie

New York City, and the most underrated band of the decade.

White Zombie spent the 90s doing something nobody else managed — making genuinely heavy music that was also enormous fun. La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 in 1992 went double platinum on the back of “Thunder Kiss ’65,” and Astro-Creep: 2000 in 1995 is the better record: industrial-tinged groove metal stitched together with B-movie samples and horror imagery.

Rob Zombie understood something most of his contemporaries didn’t. The visual side wasn’t a gimmick attached to the band; it was the band. The look, the samples, the artwork and the riffs were a single thing, and it’s the reason White Zombie broke into MTV rotation while heavier acts never got near it.

They split in 1998, at the top, which is why they get talked about less than they deserve.

Number 2 – Death

Florida, and the most important band on this list that most people have never heard.

Death started the decade as a brutal death metal band and finished it having invented technical death metal and progressive death metal more or less single-handedly. Human in 1991 is the turn — the songs got complex, the musicianship got extraordinary, and Chuck Schuldiner‘s writing started reaching for something the genre hadn’t attempted.

Then Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic and The Sound of Perseverance, each further out than the last. Schuldiner used the band as a revolving door for the best players he could find, which is why the Death discography reads like a who’s who of extreme metal musicianship.

He died in 2001, at 34. Opeth, Cynic, Between the Buried and Me, Gojira and virtually all modern technical death metal exist in the space he opened, and he never saw any of it.

Number 1 – Pantera

There was never any real doubt.

Pantera entered the 90s having spent the 80s as a glam band nobody outside Texas cared about, and then released Cowboys from Hell in 1990 and became something else entirely. Vulgar Display of Power in 1992 is the decade’s defining metal album, and Far Beyond Driven debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in 1994 — a genuinely extreme record at the top of the American chart, which had never happened and hasn’t since.

Dimebag Darrell rewrote what a metal guitarist was supposed to sound like: the squeals, the tone, the riffs that sat somewhere between thrash and Southern rock and belonged to neither. Phil Anselmo turned the vocal into pure physical threat. Vinnie Paul and Rex Brown made the whole thing swing, which is the part everyone forgets.

And they did it without compromising once. No ballad, no crossover single, no concession to the decade’s mood. In the years metal was declared dead, the heaviest band in America was selling millions of records.

Dimebag was murdered on stage in 2004. Vinnie Paul died in 2018. The catalogue is untouchable and the ranking of it is here.

Every band, ranked

Where are Metallica and Megadeth?

The question everyone’s going to ask, so here’s the straight answer.

They’re not here because the criteria at the top are weighted toward what a band built during the decade, not how many records it sold in it — and both Metallica and Megadeth spent the 90s consolidating rather than inventing.

Metallica released the best-selling metal album of the decade in 1991 and it’s an extraordinary record. But the Black Album is the endpoint of the 80s thrash project rather than the start of anything — and Load and Reload took them somewhere the rest of the genre pointedly declined to follow. Enormous decade, minimal influence on what came next. Our full ranking is here.

Megadeth‘s 90s run is the strongest four-album stretch of their career — Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction, Youthanasia, Cryptic Writings. It’s also, deliberately, refinement rather than reinvention. Rust in Peace is a 1990 album that belongs to the 80s. The whole catalogue is ranked here.

Alice In Chains are the hardest omission to defend, and the reason is a technicality — they got filed as grunge and this is a metal list. Dirt is heavier than several albums by bands who made the cut.

Also absent, and each with a case: Slayer, whose 90s was strong but whose decade of impact was the one before. Rage Against the Machine, who invented something enormous and aren’t really a metal band. Type O Negative, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Faith No More, At the Gates, In Flames, Emperor, Meshuggah and Opeth — several of whom have a better claim than one or two bands on the list.

Thirteen was never going to be enough for a decade this crowded.

Where this ranking will start arguments

Slipknot at four with one album is the obvious one. A single 1999 release outranking bands with three or four 90s records looks indefensible on paper. The case is that the album is the hinge between two eras of heavy music, and influence is the heaviest-weighted criterion.

Black Sabbath at eight on a 90s list will read as sentiment. It partly is. Dehumanizer is genuinely good and the 1997 reunion mattered more to the genre’s morale than anything else that happened that year.

Death at two, above White Zombie and Slipknot, will look high to anyone who came to metal through the mainstream and exactly right to anyone who didn’t. Chuck Schuldiner invented two subgenres in eight years.

Dream Theater at seven on a metal list will annoy people who think prog isn’t metal. Images and Words got a song in odd time signatures onto the radio in 1992, which is its own kind of heavy.

More of this in the full Loaded Radio rankings archive.

TL;DR

• Thirteen bands ranked by what they built during the 1990s, judged on influence, decade impact, innovation and endurance.
• Number one: Pantera. Vulgar Display of Power is the decade’s defining metal album, and Far Beyond Driven put a genuinely extreme record at number one on the Billboard 200 in 1994.
• Number two: Death. Chuck Schuldiner invented technical and progressive death metal more or less single-handedly, and died at 34 without seeing what grew out of it.
• The decade built four genres: groove metal, nu-metal, industrial metal and modern death metal, plus the Scandinavian black metal scene.
• Metallica and Megadeth aren’t on the list, because the criteria reward what a band built rather than what it sold — and both spent the 90s consolidating rather than inventing.
• Grunge didn’t kill metal. It pushed it underground, where it got angrier and considerably more inventive.

FAQ

Thirteen bands, four new genres, and no Metallica. Have we got that badly wrong, or does influence really beat sales? Settle it in the comments. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post 90s Metal Bands: The 13 Most Influential, And Why Grunge Didn’t Kill Them appeared first on Loaded Radio.

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