A lot of people don’t like metal. And that’s ok. Metal isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, its roots come as a reaction against that very thing. But talking to people who think they despise heavy metal is often just as difficult. Most people know about Metallica and Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, but they’re what’s considered mainstream.
Introducing your easy listening friends to metal doesn’t have to be an exercise in Green Eggs & Ham-level obsession with you chasing them around while clutching your collection of Deicide or Pig Destroyer records. Just as in the case of Sam I Am, sometimes trying something new can and often results in what’s a literally life-changing experience. We picked out 10 gateway records that could convert even the non-metal listeners.
1. Deafheaven, Sunbather
Although Deafhaven’s full-length debut Roads to Judah dropped in 2011, the San Francisco group has since become one of the most engaging metal bands since that time when Alcest actually sounded like black metal. With 2013’s Sunbather, Deafheaven took that very influence, framing it within compositional nods to “totally unmetal” artists/bands such as Johnny Marr, The Edge, and My Bloody Valentine. The vocals are most definitely harsh and the black metal foundation is ever present, but Sunbather primarily works so well due to the fact that that otherwise abrasive ferocity is carried by way of an unrelenting beauty and atmosphere. While the word “beauty” often results in the unfortunate gag reflex of many a metalhead concerning Deafheaven, it’s the selling point of one of today’s most captivating bands, metal or not.
2. ISIS, Panopticon
All stupid terrorist jokes aside, ISIS remains one of the most influential groups not only for their metal cohorts but for a litany of non-metal artists who take their strides from the band’s ornate-meets abrasive stylizations. Despite being disbanded since 2010, Boston’s post-metal giants have continued to make waves, even leaving on the high note that was their best album with 2009’s Wavering Radiant. But it was 2004’s Panopticon that marked the biggest shift in ISIS’ history, as the band employed a wider range of possibilities with what their music could accomplish rather than sticking to one particular (in this case very sludgy) brand of heavy. Just under an hour long, Panopticon is, much like its namesake, a complex and beautiful sonic journey, rendering scenes as psychologically rooted as they are physiologically concerned. It’s that combination of the abstract and the palpable that came to be the definitive characteristic of ISIS, and it began here.
3. Mastodon, Crack the Skye
One of the reasons that the hugely successful and (mostly) bearded Mastodon have become the new whipping boy for metal’s most cross-armed crybabies is likely the very thing that gives the Atlanta-based foursome an appeal to non-metal minded audiences. After three concept albums so multifarious that even Peter Gabriel would tear up, the group upped the ante and released Crack the Skye in 2009. The plotline is about as logical as your entire 70s prog collection. But it’s that same prog rock influence, which had continually growing throughout each previous Mastodon release, that came to a brilliant head on Crack the Skye. Both clean vocals (no yelling, softies) and also harsh vocals (avert your ears, softies) come packaged with some of the genre’s most astounding guitar and rhythm work since the mid-‘80s.
4. Opeth, Blackwater Park
Aside from chocolate, ABBA, and that cool movie about the vampire kid, the Scandinavian middle finger known as Sweden has given the world one of the most important metal bands of the last 20 years in Opeth. The group started in 1990 in Stockholm, but the band’s debut album Orchid served a necessary precursor to what would come with 2001’s Blackwater Park. The quintessential metal album of the 21st century so far, Blackwater Park not only raised the standard for the band who created it but for the genre and culture that would come in its wake. Even with Opeth’s much more cuddly recent efforts, the band’s most timeless and groundbreaking effort is largely so because of the band’s perfectly achieved balance between some of the most devastatingly harsh death metal vocals and the jarringly beautiful melody lines sung throughout by near-mythically versatile vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt.
5. Pallbearer, Sorrow and Extinction
A more recent example of metal’s less aurally difficult acts, Little Rock’s Pallbearer arrived on the radar of many non-metallers almost right out of the gate. Their songs are long but not overly so; they’re are ornate without falling under the weight of their own compositional structure. It’s pop slowed down to a crawl with a healthy dose of atmospheric, Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia. For any metal band to have pop appeal is like some fiction out of the early ‘90s (cough), but alas, 2012 not only saw that very thing but from a doom metal band no less. It’s a testament not only to Pallbearer’s individual members’ abilities as songwriters but also to the evolving fanbase of a genre that’s far less the oddball in the crowd than it used to be.