What Makes Heavy Metal Heavy?

Some additional thoughts/corrections: 1) Thanks to Tristan Johnson, Foreign, Thomas Frank, and Alie Astrocyte for lending me their voices for various quotes! 2) To be clear, when I said that metal bands sometimes distort the vocals, I meant they sometimes add a distortion effect to the recording. Obviously, the vocals themselves are also sometimes distorted through harsh vocal/scream techniques. 3) I learned while working on this that apparently most iconic lion roars in film are actually tiger roars, which sound different and cooler. I considered switching to that, but I thought it would be neat to include an actual clip of an actual lion. 4) I should note that Dr. Miller doesn't fully subscribe to the "surplus noise" explanation, and I think he's right to want to complicate it, but it's still a useful framework, even if it's incomplete. 5) To be clear, my disagreement with Drs. Berger and Fales is not with the idea that guitar timbres are the main surface-level thing being described by the term "heavy", I just don't think all other uses must therefore be metaphorical references to them. Difficulty-based heaviness, for instance, doesn't seem self-evidently metaphoric for guitar timbre. I would say, instead, that guitar timbres are a particularly clear and consistent instance of the metaphorical extension of what I would argue is heavy's actual primary meaning, which I get into later in the video. 6) I hope I don't get too roasted for citing Drowning Pool as an example of heaviness. I like the song, but more importantly it's one that I'm pretty confident is in drop, as opposed to using a 7-string, and the sparseness of the verse orchestration makes the downtuned rumbling really easy to hear. Besides, I cite Nile 30 seconds later, so, like, be nice to me. 7) Did I purposefully pick a particularly heavy, low-end section of Dr. Feelgood in order to prop up my claim that Motley Crue sounds sonically heavy? Sure. Is it still one of the less heavy-sounding examples in the video? Absolutely. But my point is just that it's aiming in the right direction. 8) I should note that the final definition of heaviness that I present isn't directly sourced from any particular scholarship on the topic. It's my own interpretation, from decades of experience with the genre. 9) One thing I didn't super get into in this video is metal's relation to the occult. That's certainly another aspect of its aesthetic transgression, but it's not really something that I tend to think of as "heavy" directly. Others may disagree.

Thanks for making a video directly at me, Cory!

Shouting out bands with 462 monthly listeners on Spotify. Hell yeah, doing the good work

I always felt that slow music really is better described as heavy while for extremely fast music the term brutal just feels more appropriate in my opinion.

One note on the slowness aspect: I think this calls back to what you were saying at the start about heaviness being about the sound of something physically massive. Deep, powerful sounds at a slow rate conjur up the image of a behemoth creature, its footsteps crashing into the earth. Fast tempos are a threshing machine, slow tempos are a colossus.

“If your riff isn’t heavy in standard tuning, it’s not heavy. It’s just low.” Goddamn right! 🤘

A big part of metal is expanding your tolerance to inaccessible sounds I’d say. It’s fun and increasingly rewarding so it adds a whole new dimension to it. Started with Sabaton and Ghost, now I’m jamming Vildhjarta every day.

The Brotherhood of steel symbol at 18:02 for "what's unlikely to change" really got me. I had to spend a moment to realize why, and it's because "War. War never changes." The fact that you've put such an deep Fallout reference right there amazes me, and it's in perfect reference with everything you said about the culture of defining heavy metal, radiation, cold war and everything. Kudos to you for that one!

As someone quite involved in electronic music scenes like drum n bass and dubstep it is really interesting to me that metal's quest for heaviness and and genres like dubstep and hardcore getting more and more intense drops are basically just two sides of the same coin

A big part of modern metal guitar tone is actually EQ. Mid frequencies are boosted hard into a very distorted preamp, and then those mids are taken back out after the preamp. This results in bass frequencies being much less distorted, and more prominent, while adding a lot of sustain in the mids, and the highs are also not harsh. The bass provides the thump, because it's not crushed into a flabby mess, the mids provide endless sustain while not being overbearing or harsh, and the highs provide subtle definition. This is how the really massive sounding palm mutes are achieved.

Well done, I am a metalhead and I think you hit everything on the head and taught me a few things as well. Amazing content.

From a metalhead who constantly tries to describe “heavy” to everyone around me, this could not be more spot on. I love that you shined the light on the historical context to the evolving landscape of metal and the way that we’re always chasing the next evolution. It’s an imperfect wave that seems to always get better 🤘🏼

I've worked with lots of electronic producers who also make heavy music, and what many people fail to understand is that you need to unbalance people to make music heavy. The most visceral, heavy sound is like torture. The moment comes not when your head's first dunked in the water, but when you come up for a breath and just before you finish taking a lungful of air it shoves you back down, and you have just enough time to realize you're going back in. That's when it hits you.

14:30 I died at the laugh over “slow not being heavy”😂 I’m a drone/doom metal musician who enjoys and writes VERY slow tempos. A lot of drone/doom is hovering around 40bpm and bands like Sunn O))) frequently use free time that holds chords for minutes

I saw an older interview with Roger Glover of Deep Purple a long time ago where he said they finally figured out the key ingredient to what makes a song heavy: attitude. Not speed, not volume...but attitude.

Another thing to acount for is contrast. If a song is the same amount of heavy all the way through you'll get accustomed to it. But if you first condition the listener with a less heavy segment, then go all out afterwards it will hit that much harder, making it feel much heavier as well.

I've always felt like what makes metal feel "heavy" is that it makes you focus so strongly on the pulse. That's why you bang your head to it. Everything else about the music is generally chosen to overstimulate you. This is because you wouldn't just sit there banging your head to the drum by itself for very long. "Heaviness" is that quality which makes metal more of a meditative/dissociative rhythmic experience. This is also why it's weightlifting music. Update: not deleting because I'm proud that the video validated me

Two reasons why I support your Patreon: 1. You help me understand music I know, like Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" 2. You help me understand music I don't know, like metal. I'm a better music theorist and a better composer for having watched your channel, and I really have fun listening to the way you break things down. Thank you.

Paying attention to Beethoven and the way he composed his music has a lot of similarities with metal

To me, heaviness is in the dynamics. Battery by Metallica will always be one of the heaviest songs ever in my ears because it starts out with relatively quiet acoustic guitar harmonies, basically requiring you to set your volume to taste to enjoy that section, only for the full band to kick in with fully electrified instruments and heavy drums. Sabbath was also good with this, blending softer passages with more aggressive and louder ones to convey a complexity of emotion and a range of severity. Their self-titled track is a perfect example, with whispering verses and roaring choruses. If everything is heavy, it can often feel like nothing is. Having peace disrupted is arguably more dramatic and more engaging than never having known it. This can reconcile why antiquated metal sounds from the 60s and 70s are still heavy, even by modern production and composition standards.