How Heavy?

Discussing Heaviness in Metal

Today I think I found the heaviest piece of music I’ve ever heard. It may not be objectively the heaviest piece of music ever made, perhaps there’s no objective yardstick that could bestow that title on any one track or song. But after a life spent listening to all forms of ‘extreme’ and ‘heavy’ music, I was struck by just how intense, harsh, punishing and… well… heavy this record was. Before I reveal what it is, however, I want to talk more generally about musical heaviness, what we mean by the term, what styles have best exemplified it over the history of modern music, and the gradual power-creep which pushes extreme genres to get heavier and heavier over time (that I’d like to call ‘Banger Inflation’).

Of course heaviness is relative, not only in terms of style but also temporally; across many genres new technologies allow musicians to push styles and sounds into harder and harsher places over time. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to park any discussion of extreme electronic and dance music styles, such as Gabber, Frenchcore, Breakcore etc., which are obviously obscenely heavy, but for the purposes of this thesis I’m talking about Metal, Grindcore and the extreme ends of Avant-Garde music.

It feels to me that throughout the history of guitar music there has always been a dedicated fringe devoted to pushing the extremities of the genre’s sound: Rock ‘n’ Roll leads to Hard Rock, leads to Heavy Metal, leads to Thrash Metal, leads to Death Metal, which spawns Brutal Death Metal in one direction and Black Metal as a reaction against the emerging technicality of Death Metal in the other, and so on. This is not to mention Punk’s history of escalating stylistic heaviness; moving from Punk to Hardcore to Grindcore and then Power Violence, fusing with extreme forms of Metal to form increasingly esoteric subgenres such as Goregrind, Slamming Brutal Death Metal, Pornogrind etc. and then fusions with Industrial, Experimental, Noise and The Avant-Garde to create more and more chaotic avenues for extreme forms of music.

So what is it about all this music that communicates heaviness to us? Clearly we can all instinctively understand that Napalm Death are a heavier band than The Ting Tings, but what are the defining features of musical heaviness? Well, unfortunately, like with any other densely nuanced topic, it’s both somewhat relative and subjective. Heaviness is a confluence of factors both technical and aesthetic, which communicate a kind of artistic sense of ferocity, weight, harshness, hardness, intensity, saturation and loudness; and that’s all fine and great but those are just a load of adjectives that could be interpreted in all sorts of ways by all sorts of people. Still, if the history of western music has taught us anything, it’s that certain technical features of music can produce a commonly understood and widely formalised aesthetic: look at the 18th Century topics of musical discourse in European High-Classical music, for example. Anyway, short of having an academically established and all encompassing framework for understanding heaviness in music, I think musical heaviness is the product of a confluence between several key technical categories, none of which are specifically necessary but all of which contribute to the sensation of heaviness in music. These are a confluence of speed, loudness, sonic saturation (or distortion), rhythm and aggression (both performative and production-based). Not all of these categories are important for all types of perceived heaviness, and many categories can have wildly different interpretations from one style to another. Take the category of speed, which is a hugely important characteristic in Grindcore, with the genre’s use of blast beats and miniscule song lengths that are key components in communicating its frenzied and extreme heaviness. On the other hand, Doom and Sludge Metal focus on endlessly slow and trudging waves of deafeningly saturated guitars to communicate its heaviness. Both are heavy, one could argue between which is heavier, but both have totally contrasting philosophies with regard to speed as a category for their heaviness: one frantically explodes and the other slowly engulfs.

Distortion and saturation is another category that can see almost polar opposite interpretations between styles: Black metal was founded on a commitment to lo-fi DIY production values and a deliberate over-saturated nastiness to the recordings which, especially in the early years and continued by TRVE KVLT practitioners, were often made independently with terrible equipment and no knowledge of production and mixing. This filthy and wretched production style fits perfectly with the filthy and wretched vocal and instrumental sounds of Black Metal, and demonstrates that the early Black Metal scene’s interpretation of heaviness was directly linked to its uncompromising rawness and its low-fidelity approach to saturation and distortion. By complete contrast Nu Metal sought to use the cutting edge of available hi-fidelity studio production techniques to create a sound so enormous and well-mixed that it could sustain the style’s unprecedented mainstream appeal. Drum production took cues from Hip-Hop, giving huge and thudding beats compressed to occupy as much space in the mix as possible. Massive wedges of distorted and detuned guitars played arena shattering bounce-riffs in perfectly clipped synchronicity alongside oak-like hollow bass sounds. This was music designed to animate its audience through an undeniably infectious rhythmic language and an expertly saturated hi-fi studio production style that favoured a sense of enormity and accessibility.

Now, I’m not trying to argue that any Nu Metal could possibly be in the conversation for heaviest music of all time, but I suppose I mention it to show that: firstly, how radically different approaches to musical heaviness through saturation can occur, and secondly, how heaviness in music is a relative category across time, style and sound. When compared to the right (or wrong) thing, almost anything can achieve some level of heaviness. Next to Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies, for example, even a band as comparatively tame as Feeder (who I dearly love, by the way) can seem infinitely heavy. But compare Feeder to Desomorphine Gorebulldozer and suddenly it would seem completely fatuous to consider Feeder a heavy group. Compared to ‘normal’ music, Nu Metal is a heavy genre, but up against almost anything from the umbrella of ‘extreme’ music it quickly pales in comparison if pure heaviness is all one is looking for. This is why I think there is also an important link between the harshness and abrasiveness of Experimental, Avant-Garde and Noise music styles and the pursuit of extreme heaviness in forms of Metal and Hardcore.

Noise Music (and its even more extreme sibling of Harsh noise) is a bit of a law unto itself and belongs in a slightly different category to what I have, so far, been discussing. While I think Noise Music does have an inherent kind of heaviness to it, it seems to me to be more fundamentally concerned with sheer abrasiveness of sound and texture, rather than the confluence of categories that comprise heaviness. Noise Music, by itself, feels to me more at home in the company of other abrasive avant-garde schools of thought and practice, such as Post-Tonal music, Sound-Art, Avant-Industrial music: However, when Noise elements are combined with forms of Extreme Metal and/or Grindcore then something very special can happen in terms of sheer heaviness. Look only to the Noise-laced Blackened Doomcore of Indian’s From All Purity to see how an injection of Harsh Noise can heighten the sonic intensity of a record’s atmosphere. Another excellent example is modern Grindcore darlings Full of Hell’s collaboration with Noise Music’s most prodigious legend Merzbow; this record exemplifies how adding abrasive and harsh noise elements as a stylistic modifier can push the extremity and ferocity of an already explosive genre into yet another level of heaviness and chaos.

Another matter that further complicates any straightforward framework for musical heaviness being possible is temporal relativity and ‘Banger Inflation’. There was a moment in the early 1980s when, to most ears, perhaps the heaviest music ever recorded would have been Kill ‘Em All by Metallica (or some other pioneering Thrash/Thrash adjacent record, such as Venom’s Black Metal, or Void and Faith’s ground-breaking 1982 split). Regardless of whatever you personally believe to be the heaviest album of the early 1980s, it’s clear that whatever it may have been will now have been surpassed many times over as new styles and technologies have enabled musicians to push beyond the limits of their era. My point here is that, while once the bleeding edge of musical heaviness, Thrash Metal has succumb to inflation and is now not even close to the heaviest style one can seek out: in a landscape of Extreme Metal and ever more vile subgenres Brutal-Grind music, Thrash becomes something different, its meaning and context change. It’s still heavy, it’s still fast, it’s still exhilarating, but it’s no longer at the forefront leading the charge into the abyss for the people wishing to explore the depths.

So after all this, what is the heaviest piece of music I’ve ever heard? And does it even matter? Well, probably not: I think almost everyone who’s interested in extreme and heavy music will have their own answer to this question, and people who aren’t interested could probably not care any less about what some Grind-pilled basement loser has to say about an endless stream of niche bands with unpronounceable names and illegible text-logos. But for whoever might get even a tiny kick out of it: it’s the self-titled album by ENCENATHRAKH. Enjoy x.

- phonewifey, 2024

BACK HOME