Today’s pick is interesting to me cuz I heard this artist when I started my metal journey. I would browse all of the reviews on a website called The Metal Observer (which seems to be defunct nowadays), see if they included free tracks to download and would make a whole-ass cd of random tracks. This is how I discovered bands like Belphegor, Gojira before they became so friggin popular, a Swedish techdeath band that also used the name Havok, and lastly Anger As Art.
This band blew me away as a late teenager for some stupid reason, maybe it was the album art, or how “underground” it was, I don’t even know. But they play some mid-grade thrash that for some reason still sticks to me today. Throughout the years I would look for signs of life from these guys and I would see they release albums but it kept me scratching my head as I never saw them on any streaming services. But then I looked for their Bandcamp, lo and behold here they are. Which makes sense as Bc is definitely the best way to support artists.
…Aaanyway, with that cool story done, here’s some pissed off thrash lol.
Bandcamp, RateYourMusic, Encyclopaedia Metallum, Tidal (with a live album of decent production quality)
My father put me on the Metallica train, so some could feasibly question my tastes lol. But when I dove deeper into more and more extreme metal myself, it was rather kind of spiritual.
I remember absolutely hating anything death metal or audible double bass that every “cool kid” at the time was into. I’d only listen to shit like, Manowar’s Kings of Metal album, a Metallica “greatest hits” compilation which I was missing a disk lol, even some Judas Priest (Tim Owens era). I overcame my poor taste by listening to Slayer’s Angel of Death finally and branching off from there. I count myself lucky to have known a friend back then who knew how to pirate stuff. Discovered Vader, Kalmah, and even Dragonforce (before their popularity) through him, as well as taught me how to torrent stuff, myself.
I’m lucky to be old enough that “Pirating” for me was one of those twin-tape-deck stereos. I miss physical media, and in all honesty I’m still mad a Minidisc for not becoming the universal format. They were way more futuristic than an iPod. My cousin putting his headphones on me, sat in the back of an old pickup, and playing me Tail Gunner by Iron Maiden when I was maybe 9 is still burned into my brain - his Walkman had EQ sliders in the front, which made it the coolest tape player ever pretty much!
Obviously my tastes were pretty cheesy to start with, but by the time I was 17 I was sneaking off to see Biohazard, and, over the years, having heard bands like Killswitch and Gojira pop up and fit into niches in my brain that I wasn’t really aware of existing is still as satisfying in my 40s as it was as a teen.
Edit :- putting his headphones on me. I can’t stress that enough. That would have been a very different anecdote