Warriors of the Wasteland: How Heavy Metal Survived 1995

Music is flow without the ebb. The musical soundscapes in which we are embedded resist the work of critics and historians who attempt to corral it into neat categories; into genres, eras and trends. Music laughs at the calendar. It never has a bad year. Playing and listening continue despite everything; even during catastrophic cultural collapses. While some inmates at Auschwitz were forced to play in the camp orchestra, and other inmates had to listen as they were marched to work, music flowed relentlessly, piteously on, indifferent to the whims of those who produced or consumed it.

That relentlessness also works for the good. There is always something new in music, something that’s striking and life-affirming even during epochs of aesthetic barrenness.

And so it was with metal music in 1995.

This was the year of At The Gates’ Slaughter Of The Soul, Morbid Angel’s Domination, and Ulver’s Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr i 5 Capitler. This was a year of promise, as Fear Factory’s Demanufacture, Meshuggah’s Destory Erase Improve and Rammstein’s Herzeleid began to stake out new musical territories. This was a year of future classics, such as Dissection’s Storm Of The Light’s Bane and Death’s Symbolic.

30 years on, metal music from 1995 still forms part of my listening diet; if you are a metal fan, the same may be true for you. But I come to bury 1995, not to praise it. For, while 1995 may have been a year in which metal flowed as it always does, music cannot really be separated from the human world; and for the humans of metal, 1995 was a troubled year. If we atomise this music into a series of albums, we kid ourselves that metal isn’t a social construction and a human-shaped space. In that human-shaped space, metal in 1995 was uncertain, confused and hard to parse. Which is why that year is worth listening to.

There is no one ‘true’ metal narrative of the 1990s. For the classic metal fan, it was a decade to be mourned, for the most part anyway. For them, the whiners of grunge caused a mass extinction event during which even acts as exulted as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden had to recruit new vocalists and tour playing smaller venues. Later in the decade, nu metal destroyed the cordon sanitaire between metal and Blackness, ‘infecting’ the genre with hip hop and fancy trainers. For others, the 1990s was a breath of fresh air, the start of a process in which neanderthal white masculinity loosed its hold on metal. For still others, the 1990s saw the flourishing of black metal, which – according to your perspective – either rapidly became suffocated by the untrue or led to unprecedented avant-garde explorations; or both.

Amidst these competing narratives of these competing trends, 1995 represents a point of confusion. It was clear by that stage that much of the 80s metal mainstream had been swept away (for now at least) and it was clear that new metal sounds were emerging and flourishing. It was much less clear what the metal map had been redrawn as, or what it would look like in the future. Try as you might, metal in 1995 slipped through your fingers. It still does.

One thing that was beginning to be clear, was that death metal was no longer the sound of the future. At one point, the burgeoning underground that began to emerge into the light in the late 1980s and early 1990s, promised to replace the bloated decadence of mainstream metal. Yet by 1995 it too was sounding exhausted. The Scott Burns production style – mid-range, clean with clicky bass drums – had become an appalling cliché. Not for nothing did the Norwegian black metal pioneers embrace dirty under-production in response, just as they sneered at the high tops and affableness of the denizens of the Florida scene. Even Deicide and Morbid Angel – the closest thing to dangerous that death metal had produced – would begin to fade rapidly following creative peaks in 1995 (Once Upon The Cross and Domination respectively).

The surest sign that the 80s underground would not conquer the 90s was Earache Records’ disastrous deal with Columbia, which saw their roster enjoy a brief period of lavish tours and videos, before collapsing and nearly destroying the label in the process. Carcass’ Swansong was recorded in the first few months of 1995. Full of catchy hooks and witty lyrics, Columbia intended for it to make a major splash. By the time it was released (by Earache alone) in June 1996, the Columbia deal was dead and so were the band.

If there really was a future of death metal in 1995, it could be found in Gothenburg – sort of. At The Gates’ Slaughter Of The Soul, released in November of that year, remains lauded and influential to this day. That hook-y ‘melodic’ death metal sound became the sound of the late 90s, with fellow Swedes In Flames and Dark Tranquillity leading the pack (both released albums mid-decade). For better or worse, today’s metalcore and deathcore owes a lot to that At The Gates sound. For many other successful bands, including Arch Enemy, that Gothenburg mix of crunchy death riffs and earworm-y guitar leads is almost an unquestioned orthodoxy.

But At The Gates split in 1995, and while Slaughter Of The Soul may have been critically praised on release, it certainly didn’t seem like the future. Nor could the titanic future impact of Meshuggah – later to be progenitors of their own genre, Djent – have been predicted from Destroy Erase Improve. That’s the thing about the future; its seeds are widely distributed amongst others that never germinate or never properly take root. Back in 1995 there was no clear pattern discernible amidst the evolution/decline of death metal.

If you had to pick a metal future in 1995, it probably sounded like Fear Factory’s Demanufacture. Their second album appeared high up in most end-of-year metal charts and it may well be the album that defines the year for many. Demanufacture wore its techno-dystopian futurism on its sleeve; it’s all sci-fi lyrics, machine-like riffs, cyborgian drums and cold synth-sheen. Fear Factory’s legacy was assured in the precedent Burton Bell set for the alternating clean/screamed vocals that were to be normalised by nu metal and metalcore, as well as the permission they gave to bands across the metal spectrum to play with samplers. Although the band had multiple ancestors who brought the industrial to metal (Godflesh most importantly), Fear Factory boosted the appetite for it. Certainly, while they may not have directly inspired the inhuman riffologists of Rammstein and Meshuggah (given that they were working simultaneously to each other), Fear Factory may well have been their John the Baptist audience-wise.

But ‘industrial metal’? That’s a future that never really arrived. And by the 2000s Fear Factory began a long slow decline amidst a flurry of line-up changes and hiatuses. The industrial simply became an aspect of metal’s core vocabulary while the genre itself became insubstantial, if it can be said to exist at all. You can hear some of Fear Factory’s sonic vocabulary in artists as various as Blut Aus Nord and Devin Townsend, but not the full language.

Perhaps some of the excitement about Fear Factory in 1995 was down to the desire to find something within metal that was clearly nameable. Demanufacture sounded out what the words industrial and metal connote. Elsewhere assigning genre names was a fraught and frustrating activity. Two of the most popular live acts of 1995, Machine Head and Pantera, seemed to be growing inexorably in popularity, the latter on the backs of their first three 90s albums and Machine Head following 1994’s Burn My Eyes. What exactly were they though? Even today, both acts are largely known simply as heavy metal bands. Other terms, such as ‘groove metal’ (which is sometimes applied to Pantera) are by no means universally known or used.

Pantera and Machine Head weren’t the only ones. What was Korn (whose debut album came out in 1994) or the Deftones (whose debut, Adrenaline came out in 1995)? Of course, today we know them as nu metal, but one of the fascinating things about that genre is how long it took to settle on a name. In the late 90s, as a writer for Terrorizer, I watched the magazine’s editors and writers trying out terms like ‘woolly hat’ and (more seriously) ‘SoCal’ (a reference to the southern Californian location of many of the bands) as well as ‘new metal’.

In the mid-90s something appeared to have interrupted the well-worn process through which genres come to be named. There was innovation all around but it didn’t seem to quite cohere. And even when it did, the fit was often awkward and left some artists out. Sonically, it seems self-evident that Pantera laid many of the foundations for nu metal, yet as I pointed out, the only term that connects the two together – groove metal – is only ever used erratically.

The clearest genre term to become ubiquitous in the 90s was, of course, black metal (even if it had already been used since the early 80s). Here though, much energy was spent within the scene on internecine disputes about to whom the term could authentically be applied. By the mid-90s there was already a fundamental incoherence to the genre; one which endures to this day. Black metal is, on the one hand, a hyper-conservative and elitist underground genre that eschews innovation and cross-fertilisation, and on the other hand the pre-eminent site of metal innovation.

Two of 1995’s most memorable black metal releases demonstrate, in retrospect, how far black metal could be an unhelpfully broad term for the genre even at the time. Ulver’s Bergtatt – Et Eeventyr i 5 Capitler was an extraordinarily ambitious debut album in which tremolo riffs struggled to survive amidst evocative folk-archaisms. Ulver’s subsequent musical pathway has led to – well can anyone really describe it? Wikipedia calls them ‘experimental electronica’ which seems inadequate. Black metal in 1995 somehow held together artists as disparate as Ulver and Immortal, whose third album, Battles In The North was released that year. Their video for ‘Blashyrkh (Mighty Ravendark)’, filmed in the snow atop a mountain, cemented corpse paint, bullet belts and inadequate clothing into black metal’s popular imaginary. Where Ulver’s 1995 release was to lead to concert halls and features in The Wire, Battles In The North was to lead Immortal towards jokey, blokey rock & roll and festival headline slots, with Abbath becoming a beloved and ridiculous metal national treasure.

In retrospect then, the compilation Nordic Metal: A Tribute To Euronymous, which was released in 1995, was as much as anything an attempt to reassert an orthodoxy that was already collapsing. Featuring ‘first wave’ acts such as Abruptum, Mayhem, Emperor, Enslaved and Thorns, this assertion of the cultural capital derived from proximity to Euronymous’s project to define black metal, is still a breathtaking listen. Yet however much the story of early 90s Norwegian black metal is endlessly retold to this day, by 1995 it had lost all relevance in defining what black metal was actually becoming.

Did 1995 see metal in a kind of identity crisis then? Did the inadequacy of genre names reflect a fundamental doubt that metal meant anything at all?

You can certainly see a deep insecurity in the mid-90s work of bands who had achieved success in the 80s and feared redundancy. They were right to be concerned: Anthrax’s 1995 release Stomp 442 saw the band dropping into the commercial doldrums amidst label conflict and lineup changes. It’s an identifiably Anthrax album – the riffs still chug, the pace still holds up – but, as with its predecessor Sound Of White Noise, the half-hearted nods to alternative rock betray a lack of confidence. John Bush’s vocals, which are much grittier than his predecessor Joey Belladonna’s, weakly affirm the performative authenticity of grunge but only end up undermining the sound of a band who owed their success to the infectious joy of their zippy, chunky sound.

Anthrax weren’t the only ones to feel they somehow had to change, but in doing so only proved their redundancy. In 1996 Def Leppard’s Slang would add grungy grit to their sound to no discernible purpose. The car crash that is Mötley Crüe spent the 90s occasionally giving in to Tommy Lee’s evident yearnings to be alt. And most prominently, on 1996’s Load Metallica went all in on a confused amalgam of classic rock, grunge, alt and whatever else. While the band were too gifted not to come up with occasional highlights on the album (‘Hero Of The Day’ is an unacknowledged classic), the message that came across loud and clear on Load was a desperate search for a path forward. That sound of desperation echoed across several more albums – not without some startling moments – before the band began to find a certain peace in the late 2010s.

What certainties were there in metal’s mid-90s to hold on to? AC/DC perhaps. Although not exactly a metal band, 1995’s Ballbreaker was an AC/DC album, albeit not one of the most inspired. Beyond that, Judas Priest were MIA. Rob Halford’s post-split act Fight split itself in 1995 and the rest of Priest took until 1996 to recruit Tim ‘Ripper’ Owen as Halford’s replacement. 1997’s Jugulator is underrated and nods to the zeitgeist with a hint of Panteraish groove metal (whatever that is). It is not the Priest on which many relied though, nor was Halford’s 2wo, his project with John 5 whose sole album, 1998’s Voyeurs mined industrial S&M to confusing effect.

There was Maiden though. 1995’s The X Factor did provide some sense of solidity to the confused space of metal. The first post-Bruce Dickinson release with Blaze Bayley on vocals, the album is… fine; or maybe a little more than fine. Perhaps a little more sombre than previous releases, it is still unquestionably Maiden. Really it’s the sound of a band hunkering down, carrying on, no matter what. In the next few years, the tours would continue, even if the venues would be a little smaller. They would release another album with Bailey, 1998’s Virtual XI, which thrilled few and saw a significant dip in sales – but it was still Maiden. Bayley was fired in 1999 and Dickinson rejoined (invigorated by some spritely solo albums). The following year’s Brave New World was a return to form. The storm had been weathered.

Iron Maiden’s stubborn survival in the mid-decade doldrums holds few aesthetic lessons, but it did provide something that metal lacked in 1995, an unashamed conviction that music is about more than just producing enjoyable sounds. As I began, metal in 1995 provided all the sonic thrills you could want; the flow of inspiration and creativity never stopped. What was missing was context, direction, history and a shared experience of a collective metal journey. In metal’s 1995 we glimpsed a future in which music was reduced to a series of sonic nodes; an embarrassment of musical riches existing without much relationship to each other, to the past or to the future. Brilliant stars in an asocial wasteland.

You might say that, thirty years on, we have arrived at the future that 1995 prefigured. And, surprisingly, you’d be wrong. Yes, it’s true that metal today is expanding in all directions at once, within an online world in which no genre ever dies and no new one can ever guard its boundaries. Listening is privatised and choice is limitless. Everything, everywhere, all at once. An unending flow state.

All that is true, but what’s also true is that, now well over 50 years old, metal exudes an overarching sense of being a world in and of itself. Metal is community, is culture, is history, is everything, is ageless. Gojira’s performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony – universally welcomed in the metal world – seemed to grant metal the status of a nation. And maybe in that nation, sub-genres are only counties, administrative units rather than the fiefdoms of old. Bands like Maiden endure, almost for the sake of endurance; they are the bedrock on which this nation is built.

This is what was lacking in 1995. Metal didn’t come close to dying but it did come close to dissipating. In many ways it is an extraordinary surprise that metal came back from the brink; it happened nonetheless. A bad year; yet what survived has become ageless.