Ryan Montgomery

A Lineage of Mythic-Level Heavy Music

35 albums that expanded what heaviness can mean — and the part of it no description can reach.

Master's Ashes: Survivors

How veterans of Voivod, Crisis, Dystopia, Mindrot, Crowbar, and The Convalescence forged one of modern heavy music's most compelling new voices.

Dan the Man

Why Dan Swanö May Be the Most Important Metal Visionary Most People Never Talk About — a deep dive into Edge of Sanity, Nightingale, Moontower, Bloodbath, and the career of one of metal's great builders.

Rust and Circuitry

How Nine Inch Nails Built a Bridge Between Metal and Machines — Ryan Montgomery and Travis Cooley on how Trent Reznor fused industrial electronics with heavy music on Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral.

How College Football Lost Its Soul — and How It Can Still Be Saved

For more than a century, college football was about identity, loyalty, and shared tradition. Today those foundations are being dismantled by television money, donor arms races, and a free-agency system with no framework to sustain it.

From Hoax to Heavyweight: The History of Porcupine Tree

Porcupine Tree began as a joke about a band that never existed. Over three decades, it became one of the most influential progressive rock bands in the world, and, from 2002 onward, one of the heaviest.

Quadrophenia: When Rock Music Became Great Art

More than half a century after its release, The Who's Quadrophenia remains one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of popular music — a coming-of-age novel, a psychological character study, and a monumental work of rock composition.

Songs That Matter: Samhain, “Archangel”

A song written for a punk legend, recorded on the eve of the Misfits' collapse, and left to close Samhain's debut. Five minutes that sound like Glenn Danzig fronting Joy Division.

By the Power of Graystone: Lost Classics – 1971

The only surviving document of a band that should have made it: a live garage tape from the suburbs north of Seattle, raw and loud and gone too soon.

By the Power of Graystone: Lost Classics – 1971

The only surviving document of a band that should have made it: a live garage tape from the suburbs north of Seattle, raw and loud and gone too soon.

Songs That Matter: Drive Like Jehu, “Luau”

Nine and a half minutes from San Diego that sound like a band discovering the outer limit of what tension can do.

Porcupine Tree – Fear of a Blank Planet (2007)

A concept album about a medicated, screen-addled generation, written before smartphones changed everything. Porcupine Tree at their peak.

King Crimson – In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

The album that invented progressive rock — and in October 1969, before Black Sabbath had released a note, one of the heaviest records ever made.

Opeth – My Arms, Your Hearse (1998)

The album where Opeth found themselves: a ghost story told through linked songs, a band shedding its black metal skin, and one of the darkest records in the catalog.

Opeth – Deliverance (2002)

The heaviest album Opeth ever made, recorded under enormous pressure alongside its gentle companion Damnation — dense, punishing, and containing a live anthem that has closed nearly every Opeth concert for two decades.

Opeth – Ghost Reveries (2005)

The summit of Opeth’s death metal era: heavy, dark and complex, but lush and melodic, with Per Wiberg’s keyboards adding a new progressive dimension — made amid bitter division, somehow one of their most unified albums.

Slipknot – Iowa (2001)

The heaviest album ever to reach the top of the mainstream charts: nine masked men from Des Moines pouring two years of rage, addiction and internal war into 66 minutes of relentless brutality.

Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

A death metal band from Colorado traveled to Berlin, recorded in the studio where Bowie, Eno and Tangerine Dream made history, and came back with two twenty-minute journeys into the cosmos.

Cirith Ungol: From Cult Curiosity to Heavy Metal Immortality

The story of one of heavy metal's great corrections — a band that arrived too early, built a legend in absentia, and came back to find the world had finally caught up.

The Seattle Big Four: A Retrospective and an Unpopular Opinion

Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana defined a generation. All four are great. But one has been elevated above the others — and it's time to say so.

Steven Wilson: The Overview

His eighth solo album is not heavy in the usual sense. What it offers instead is a different kind of weight.

The Resonance Beneath Megadon

A homage to Rush's 2112 rendered in the cosmic-horror register of H.P. Lovecraft.

The Inhabited Void: Space, Remediation, and Collaborative Dread in House of Leaves

House of Leaves is best understood as a novel about the inhabitation of absence.

Careful What You Wish For: Obsession and the Horror of Being Loved Without Consent

A deeply uncanny meditation on agency, consent and manipulation.

Swing of the Axe: The Enduring Legacy of Power Trip

Four days after releasing their first new music in nearly a decade, Power Trip's legacy endures.

103 Great Heavy Guitar Solos

From Tony Iommi to Dave Knudson — 103 solos that define what the electric guitar can do in heavy music.

Opeth, "Deliverance"

Thirteen minutes of progressive death metal that end with one of the most famous riffs in modern metal.

The Power of Folk Horror: How Cinema Turned Folklore Into Nightmare

From The Wicker Man to The Witch, Midsommar, The Wailing, and Hereditary.

Mad Max and the Modern Myth

Across five films spanning more than four decades, George Miller transformed Max Rockatansky into a wandering archetype.

At the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft's Greatest Achievement

The Elder Things, the shoggoths, Danforth's final vision, and the del Toro adaptation that never was.

Unquestionable: Atheist and the Invention of Technical Death Metal

How a band from Sarasota, Florida rewrote the rules of extreme metal with one album.

At the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft’s Greatest Achievement and the Horror of Cosmic Insignificance

The Elder Things, the shoggoths, Danforth’s final vision, and the del Toro adaptation that never was. A deep read of the novella that turned horror into a meditation on humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The Power of Folk Horror: How Cinema Turned Folklore Into Nightmare

From The Wicker Man to The Witch, Midsommar, The Wailing, and Hereditary — twelve of the greatest folk horror films ever made and the genre that continues to haunt modern cinema.

Rage Against the Machine, "Freedom"

A song that ends with a single word, and a band that spent thirty years trying to make it come true.

Black Sabbath / Soundgarden, "Into the Void"

One song, two versions, twenty years apart: a Birmingham band's vision of escaping a dying Earth, and a Seattle band's reinvention of it.

Carcosa in the Bayou: The Cosmic Horror of True Detective, Season One

How a nineteenth-century book of stories, H.P. Lovecraft and a reclusive philosopher shaped the most influential crime drama of the 2010s.

Crimson III: The Harvest

An unofficial fan-made continuation of the story told on Edge of Sanity's Crimson (1996) and Crimson II (2003).

The Black Sword Sings: Elric, the Eternal Champion and Heavy Music

How Michael Moorcock's creations became one of heavy music's great mythologies.

Rush in Seattle: The Power of Friendship, the Weight of Loss, and the Joy of Playing On

Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Annika Nilles brought the 50th anniversary tour to Climate Pledge Arena. Three writers were there.

Tool, "Eulogy"

An eight-and-a-half-minute sermon from 1996. The moment Ænima stopped easing you in and started testing you.

Lamb of God, "Blacken the Cursed Sun"

The moment Lamb of God's angriest voice turned the anger inward. A document of a man describing the hole he was in years before he climbed out of it.

Fugazi, "Waiting Room"

Under three minutes that redrew the map of punk. Joe Lally's bass line, the silences, and why Ian MacKaye's manifesto never expired.

Stories in Steel: Great Concept Albums in Heavy Rock and Metal

Eighteen albums that prove heavy music and ambitious storytelling are a natural fit — from Crimson to Metropolis to Crack the Skye.

Botch: The Full History

From Tacoma basements to the blueprint for a decade of heavy music — the complete story of one of the most influential bands you may have missed.

The Professor’s Students: Extreme Metal’s Debt to Rush

Rush never played death metal, never blasted, never growled. But ask the drummers and songwriters behind some of the most extreme music ever made where it started, and the Canadian trio keeps coming up.

The Tumwater Connection

How a small Washington State town became an unlikely node in the Pacific Northwest heavy music underground.

Revolving Door

When Ozzy was fired in 1979, Black Sabbath was widely assumed to be finished. Instead, Tony Iommi oversaw one of the most remarkable experiments in rock history — a revolving door of vocalists, each bringing a different vision to the band while somehow preserving its essential character.

The Mars Volta – Amputechture

The record where The Mars Volta stopped worrying about whether anyone would follow them and simply went where the music led.

Black Sabbath – Master of Reality

Rush – Moving Pictures

Samhain – Initium

Fates Warning – Awaken the Guardian

Soundgarden – Ultramega OK

Slint – Spiderland

Pantera – Vulgar Display of Power

Helmet – Meantime

Alice in Chains – Dirt

Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine

Tool – Undertow

Soundgarden – Superunknown

Kyuss – Welcome to Sky Valley

Edge of Sanity – Crimson

Soundgarden – Down on the Upside

Neurosis – Through Silver in Blood

Tool – Ænima

Karp – Self Titled LP

Opeth – Still Life

Botch – We Are the Romans

At the Drive-In – Relationship of Command

System of a Down – Toxicity

Tool – Lateralus

Opeth – Blackwater Park

Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf

Mastodon – Leviathan

The Mars Volta – Frances the Mute

Lamb of God – Sacrament

Mastodon – Crack the Skye

Elder – Dead Roots Stirring

Elder – Lore

Tool – Fear Inoculum

Chat Pile – God's Country

Master's Ashes – How the Mighty Have Fallen