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That book will be out next week.

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Their North American tour with Bilmuri and Knuckle Puck launches tomorrow.

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Source

A graceful rendition of the “Morning View” deep cut.

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Off The Record, the band’s new album (out tomorrow on Wild Honey Records and Ammonia Records), isn’t particularly surprising in terms of musical style or approach. But why would you want it to be? When it comes to Radio Days, I just want great pop songs. I never tire of the band’s approach because they do it so remarkably well. And their sound is so fresh because they infuse modern power pop influences into their classic, ’60s and ’70’s–inspired songwriting foundation. In 2016, I named their long player Back in the Day my album of the year, and I’d do it again if I had to re-evaluate the LPs that came out that year. Off The Record might be every bit as good. Radio Days as a band have definitely matured and refined their talents over the years, but they’ve never lost sight of those things that matter the most: memorable melodies, silky-smooth harmonies, perfect choruses, and timeless love songs. As a craftsman of melody, Dario Persi is criminally underrated. He’s also a wonderful singer. The band’s lyrics, written by Paco Orsi and Mattia Baretta, will remind you why you first came to love pop music and why you keep going back to it. 

It seems almost unnecessary to say that Off The Record is a classic power pop record since that’s the only kind of record that Radio Days bother to make. But I will say that while many power pop bands kind of grow tiresome if they don’t change up their approach over time, Radio Days are on album #5 of pure power pop classicism and are only getting better. With each new album, I keep thinking, “This is finally the one they won’t be able to top.” And then the next one comes out, and I say the same thing. I’m done doubting these guys. 99.9% of bands would wish for a greatest-hits compilation as good as Off the Record. From the punchy and melodious “I Won’t Give Up” to the all-the-feels majesty of “One Heart One Love” to the sun-kissed ’70s splendor of “Paralyzed” to the pure pop bliss of “She’s My Girl” to the laidback, Weezer-ish stunner “I’ve Got a Song” and all points in between, this album is all killer and no filler. And it certainly didn’t hurt to have Bruno Barcella, one of the finest music producers in the business, recording and mixing these songs. 

While Off the Record will certainly appeal to folks who love their classic power pop, I don’t think a word like “retro” correctly captures the vibe. Radio Days aren’t trying to bring back power pop — they’re simply one of many bands keeping the legacy alive. As 2026 continues to establish itself as an extraordinary year for guitar pop albums, I hope people will realize that one of the very best of the lot has come from Milan, Italy.

Before modern algorithmic feeds, heavy metal listeners laid the groundwork for today’s participatory web culture. Long before Twitter threads and Reddit upvotes, heavy metal fans were arguing online with a ferocity and depth that no other music community could match. They were there early, they were organised, and they were serious.

Usenet newsgroups devoted to metal and its offshoots existed from the first years of public internet access, functioning as the genre’s original digital gathering points. That early arrival wasn’t accidental. It was the direct expression of a fan culture that had always been built around obsessive documentation, long-distance correspondence, and the firm belief that getting the details right actually mattered.

A Croatian Digital-Culture Lens on Fan Community Life

The Geek.hr Team, which covers technology and digital trends for Croatian readers, has long observed how participatory online communities took root in Central and Eastern Europe. Their editorial perspective sits close to this history. Croatia and its neighbours developed active underground metal scenes from the late 1980s onward, with dedicated fans relying first on international postal networks and then on early internet forums to connect with the wider global community and discover new music.

From that vantage point, forum discussions in Croatia served as concrete anchoring points for the local scene, spaces where metal fans and other niche audiences gathered to trade recommendations and argue taxonomy long before mainstream platforms arrived. As the Geek.hr Team observes, this pattern of intensely structured, topic-focused online participation is part of a broader regional story:

“Online adult leisure discussion communities represent a parallel and equally native branch of this same participatory digital culture. The metal forums were simply its loudest and most visible expression.”

How Metal Fans Colonised Early Internet Infrastructure

Usenet newsgroups gave heavy metal fans their first large-scale digital home, and they filled it immediately. The genre’s subcultures already possessed the raw material for online community: exhaustive knowledge-sharing habits, international networks sustained by postal correspondence, and a collective compulsion to categorise everything. Mailing lists followed, and then dedicated forums as the web matured. Each technological step offered more structure, and metal fans used every bit of it.

What made this colonisation distinctive was that it wasn’t casual browsing. Metal listeners arrived on these platforms already trained in the norms of deep engagement. They were accustomed to writing long letters to strangers in other countries to obtain a cassette of a band’s 1987 demo. Moving that same energy into a forum thread required almost no cultural adjustment. The infrastructure changed; the intensity didn’t.

The Architecture of a Metal Forum Argument

Anyone who has spent time in metal online spaces recognises the recurring shape of the debate. At its centre is the authenticity axis: which bands are genuine, which have sold out, and who among the listeners has the standing to make that call. This isn’t a product of internet culture. The “true metal” versus commercial distinction predates online forums by decades, running through fanzines and backstage arguments long before anyone had a username. Forums amplified it by giving every participant a permanent, searchable record of their positions.

Alongside authenticity disputes sit the subgenre boundary wars. Thrash versus speed metal, death versus black metal, doom versus gothic metal: these distinctions generate threads of extraordinary length and heat. The lines being argued over are real to the participants in a way that outsiders often find hard to credit, because inside metal culture, taxonomy is identity. Getting the label wrong isn’t pedantry; it’s a category error about what the music means.

Gatekeeping completes the picture. The policing of fan credentials, the demand that a listener prove their knowledge before their opinion carries weight, is particularly pronounced in metal communities and particularly visible in online environments where new participants arrive constantly. It’s a feature, not a bug, from the community’s own perspective: it maintains the signal-to-noise ratio that makes the forums worth reading.

The Tape-Trading Ethos That Shaped Digital Sharing

Before any of the online infrastructure existed, metal fans built something remarkable through the post. Tape trading, the practice of exchanging cassette recordings of rare albums, live shows, and demos through physical mail, created international underground networks that spanned continents. The economics were deliberately non-commercial. You traded what you had for what you needed. Scarcity carried prestige. The obligation to reciprocate was taken seriously.

When digital file-sharing arrived, metal communities adapted faster than most because they didn’t have to invent new norms. The ethos transferred directly: free exchange, reciprocity, discovery over profit, and the cultural weight attached to having access to obscure material. The technology changed the delivery mechanism. Everything underneath it, the values that determined how sharing was supposed to work, came straight from the tape-trading postal network. That inheritance shaped how early digital music distribution functioned within the genre, with community logic, not commercial logic, governing the flow of music.

Encyclopaedia Metallum and the Work of Keeping Underground Scenes Alive

Commercial platforms and algorithmic recommendation are not built for funeral doom or dungeon synth or raw black metal. The audiences are small, the release cycles are irregular, and the bands often operate entirely outside any infrastructure a mainstream service would recognise. These subgenres survive because dedicated fan communities perform, without payment or institutional support, the work that no commercial entity would find worthwhile.

Underground metal has always depended on fan networks rather than radio airplay or press coverage for discovery and distribution. That dependency made community infrastructure essential from the beginning, not a supplement to mainstream channels but the primary channel. Encyclopaedia Metallum, widely known as the Metal Archives, is the clearest example of what this produces at scale. A community-built, fan-maintained database covering an enormous catalogue of bands and releases, it has become the most comprehensive metal reference resource available anywhere, a collective archival project with no real equivalent in other music genres.

The archival function the Metal Archives performs isn’t decorative. For a band operating in a niche so narrow that it receives no coverage elsewhere, inclusion in a fan-built database is the difference between existing in the record and not existing at all. That’s what these communities do. They keep things alive that would otherwise disappear without notice.

Metal fans didn’t stumble onto internet forums. They built on them, systematically, with the same dedication they had always brought to documenting, debating, and preserving a genre that mainstream culture has rarely taken seriously on its own terms. The template they created, encyclopaedic, opinionated, fiercely self-organised, became the working model for committed online fan discourse. That’s the genre’s quiet structural legacy, sitting underneath internet culture, largely uncredited, entirely intact.

TL;DR: Heavy metal fans laid the structural blueprint for modern online communities decades ago. Transitioning seamlessly from international cassette tape-trading networks into Usenet groups and dedicated discussion boards, metal listeners pioneered non-commercial music sharing, rigid taxonomic debate, and massive self-curated archives like Encyclopaedia Metallum that continue to preserve underground culture.

The post How Heavy Metal Fans Built the Internet’s Most Obsessive Communities appeared first on Loaded Radio.

MVD Audio [Release date 06.11.26] We last reviewed Bob Holz in 2023 and his album which gave equal billing to co-producer Rob Stathis. The latter takes more of a production role on this latest release which once again harnesses the … Continue reading →

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