Metal

Visit Why Metal Matters and follow on instagram to see this project in full

Visit this page for the article “I Felt the Landscape Screaming Through the Music: Metal, Nature, and Environmentalism”

Anyone who spends time in coastal spaces, or other regions at the frontlines of climate collapse and anti-colonial politics, will soon realise there are hundreds of metal bands and metalheads around. The incidence of Sepultura or Black Sabbath t-shirts in a city like Nuuk or Tórshavn far exceeds that in cities like Belo Horizonte or Birmingham, and over the past decade in particular, metal has become a means for expressing counter-cultural environmental activism and indigenous identity. Many genres of metal, from death to black and metalcore have been labelled “the music of the anthropocene” and discussed as styles that perform, as the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton puts it, “a very significant distortion of normative environmentalist subjectivity’. The research for my last two books involved unexpected exposure to lots of this music and its powerful and purposeful engagement in the biggest questions of our time.

Here’s a range of my photos from the early stages of research into this phenomenon, including bands like Partholón, who use their metal to represent the small boat communities of the West of Ireland, Blackbraid, whose music is an exploration of Mohawk identity and its ties to landscape, Agolloch, who present cinematic rural music-scapes in stage shows inspired by the Northern Lights, Pict, whose music explores Highland landscapes, and Napalm Death and Carcass, who pioneered the links between environmentalism and heavy music.